News

IBM's DB2 Gains Ground in SAP Environments

• By Scott Bekker
• 12/07/1999

SAP AG and IBM Corp. today announced an agreement to expand their global sales, marketing, and development relationship. As part of the agreement, the two companies will work together to provide expanded choices for customers that wish to implement mySAP.com (www.mysap.com) Internet business solutions and IBM's DB2 Universal Database on a variety of hardware platforms, including Windows 2000. In addition, IBM's DB2 Universal Database will replace Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com) as the primary database on IBM (www.ibm.com), Sun, and Linux platforms for internal development and production systems within SAP (www.sap.com).

Through the expanded partnership, customers will have a wider choice of hardware platforms when using IBM DB2 with SAP solutions. Additionally, customers will no longer have to incur the time or expense of changing their existing hardware platforms when porting to DB2 databases for SAP solutions.

The broader platform support using DB2 -- including support for Windows NT/2000, Sun Solaris, Linux, and several IBM systems -- will proliferate the use of mySAP.com. Through this support, mySap.com software solutions can gain the benefits of heterogeneous and multiplatform support provided by one database product as well as functionality for the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), such as parallel database support for full scalability. The first mySAP.com offerings of Workplace server, SAP Business-to-business Procurement, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Strategic Enterprise Management, and SAP Knowledge Management are scheduled to ship this month on all DB2 platforms for SAP.

Today's announcement builds upon the strong relationship between SAP and IBM, and strikes a blow to Oracle. The SAP-IBM tie already includes DB2 and SAP joint product development and customer support, a joint marketing fund, a dedicated IBM DB2 sales team for SAP, dedicated SAP DB2 sales executives and sponsors worldwide, and integrated solution support centers in Germany, Canada, and Calif. -- Isaac Slepner