The Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that SAP will announce a partnership with Sybase to package its database with SAP's Business One offering to small businesses. SAP Business One is an ERP package that SAP offers separately form its mySAP suite. With Microsoft competing directly for applications sales to small business, SAP clearly is not comfortable relying on Microsoft's SQL Server database as part of its offerings. There's no such problem with Sybase. "Since I never will compete with SAP, this partnership will be pretty tight," says Sybase CEO John Chen. "I never will do applications."
I've been saying for over a year now that Microsoft's aggressive push into the enterprise applications space would have this unintended consequence: motivating the large enterprise application vendors to look for alternatives to Microsoft technology. By partnering with Sybase, SAP not only gets an alternative database but alternative operating systems as well, because Sybase's database runs on Unix and Linux as well as on Microsoft platforms.
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has details on the SAP/Sybase partnership. A joint press release on the SAP web site gives additional details, if you read past the marketing fluff.
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