SAP chief talks tough

Software giant SAP has said that the technology industry will severely damage itself unless applications are developed that work together irrespective of hardware and language.

Speaking at Sun Microsystem's JavaOne conference in San Francisco yesterday, SAP chief executive Hasso Plattner chose some dramatic words to sum up his concerns.

"The industry will not survive the next 20 years with applications built by a few big companies," he warned. "It will only survive if there is a community of developers building applications that can work together across many systems."

SAP is in a tricky position regarding code. It chose ABAP as its proprietary code but saw Java eclipse it in sheer numbers of programmers, so Plattner's stance has now mellowed.

He maintained that the problem for software vendors is commonality. "We have to develop standards so we can port what we develop on system X onto system Y with relatively little effort," he said.

Plattner concluded his keynote with a rousing call to the industry. "We must stick together and work on these standards," he insisted. "This has to be the philosophy of our industry in the future."