The agreement effectively leverages the strengths of the two companies for the mutual benefit of their customers through greater integration of products and services, and greater levels of committed resources from both SAP and IBM.
As part of the agreement, IBM will license and integrate technology from SAP Portals Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG, for IBM’s WebSphere® Portal Server providing customers shared access from their desktops to a wide array of applications and information across all industries. SAP Markets, another subsidiary of SAP AG, is licensing WebSphere® for projects and development in helping businesses improve relationships with customers and partners, streamline operations, and improve supply chain efficiencies via the Internet.
IBM has more than 5,000 consultants helping more than 1,900 companies across the world succeed with their SAP projects. SAP projects are among the leading partner-driven sources of business for IBM. In recognizing the further growth in demand for mySAP.com, IBM Global Services is retraining a significant portion of its consulting practice to more completely cover the entire mySAP.com e-Business platform. In addition, SAP has certified IBM as an SAP Global Hosting Partner, and consequently IBM Global Services will extend Application Management Services offerings to its portfolio of SAP services to help customers take more complete advantage of mySAP.com e-business applications.
With these latest developments, IBM and SAP have forged relationships across all of their major brand offerings. The commitment of IBM product brands, including DB2® Universal Database, WebSphere®, Lotus®, Tivoli®, eServer® pSeries®, iSeries®, xSeries® and zSeries®, IBM Storage Products®, IBM business consulting and information technology services and IBM Global Financing underscores the 20-year relationship leading up to today’s announcement.
This alliance between SAP and IBM brings the benefits of e-business to more customers in more industries than ever before, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. IBM and SAP deliver strong value to customers who prefer an integrated offering from two of the top providers in the industry. SAP’s market-proven mySAP.com e-business platform and IBM’s robust e-infrastructure together support extended business processes with open integration, scalability, messaging and strong security.
The expansion of this relationship is in response to clear market demand for integrated products and demonstrates our ability to collaborate in delivering superior value to customers, said Hasso Plattner, co-chairman, CEO and co-founder of SAP AG. As companies seek to create business processes that cross system and company boundaries, many are finding that they need the combined technical and service resources of market leaders such as SAP and IBM. By providing SAP applications that are integrated with IBM’s infrastructure, customers receive the most comprehensive and stable platforms to conduct e-business.
