Business software maker SAP AG has decided to back the software development platform based on the Java programming language from Sun Microsystems Inc. over the .Net software platform from competitor Microsoft Corp., according to a report in the Financial Times newspaper Tuesday.
SAP Chief Executive Hasso Plattner is expected to make the announcement at the SAP Teched 2001 conference in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, according to the report. SAP declined to comment on the report but did confirm that Plattner would be speaking at the conference.
SAP, Europe's biggest software company, will adopt Sun's J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) architecture as its development platform for enterprise software, the FT reported, citing sources close to the company. Microsoft has been challenging Sun's popularity as the vendor of choice for enterprise application development platforms, and its failure to woo a company the size of SAP could be seen as a setback for Microsoft.
Sun and Microsoft have been in stiff competition to lure software developers to either Java or Windows, stressing that the Web services skills that developers are required to learn would lead them to choose one platform over the other, as opposed to learning both.
SAP AG, in Walldorf, Germany, can be reached at +49-6227-747-474 or http://www.sap.de/. Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington, can be reached at +1-425-882-8080 or http://www.microsoft.com/. Sun, based in Palo Alto, California can be reached at +1-650-960-1300 or http://www.sun.com.
