SAP will back .Net

German software giant SAP AG said it would back both Microsoft's .Net strategy and rival Sun Microsystems' Java technology, rebutting reports this week that SAP would give its full backing to the Sun platform.

SAP North American spokesperson Bill Wohl said a lot of interest had been created by the inaccurate and incomplete newspaper story. "We've spent the last 24 hours trying to balance it."

According to Wohl, the UK's Financial Times got the story wrong; they relied on the wrong sources.

An article in the newspaper said that SAP chief executive Hasso Plattner would announce on 6 November that the company intends to drop support for .Net in favour of Sun's latest Java Enterprise Edition Platform (J2EE).

J2EE is a key component of Sun Open Network Environment (ONE), a suite of web services that directly rivals Microsoft's .Net strategy.

Microsoft's initiative is not compatible with Sun's widely used, cross-platform programming language, Java.

According to the news report, SAP wanted to develop a bridge, of sorts, for Java and .Net. This would have allowed SAP to build products on top of the bridge, rather than separately for each platform.

But Microsoft allegedly threw up roadblocks to that effort, and SAP grew impatient.

"The FT story implied SAP was favouring one development platform over another, which, in fact, is not what we're doing," Wohl said.

Wohl said SAP has for the last few years provided market solutions that are very much open. "The very meaning of openness is that we are not going to do anything in the way we support our customers that will limit their choices about technology standards and technology strategies," he said.

Wohl further stated that openness is a key differentiator for SAP as opposed to its chief competitor, Oracle, which tries to convince customers to choose an end-to-end solution.

"We understand customers make lots of choices for different reasons and SAP will rarely be 100 per cent of a company's footprint," Wohl said.

He said SAP will unveil its vision for the next generation technology infrastructure built on the foundation of openness next week at the company's Technology Conference, TechEd, for outside software developers, in Los Angeles.

"It's not about choosing a specific partner or platform, but to the contrary, it's about an infrastructure for ebusiness enterprise solutions that give customers choices and solutions," Wohl said. He added that SAP will continue to set itself apart on openness.

He emphasised there would be no announcement next week about dropping support for .Net.

When asked about the FT story, a Microsoft spokesperson called it "speculative and inconsistent with what SAP has said in the past."