SAP, IBM, HP Team Up to Support DB2 for mySAP.com
ERP giant SAP, IBM and HP announced that companies installing mySAP.com solutions may now choose IBM's DB2 Universal Database for HP 9000s running HP-UX 11. mySAP.com solutions with R/3 Release 4.6C and DB2 7.1 on HP-UX platforms are scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of this year.
The agreement among the three industry heavyweights expands the market of each. Last December SAP and IBM forged a deal to combine SAP's business management software with the DB2 database. The deal expanded the number of hardware platforms for DB2 to include Windows 2000, Sun, Linux and Windows NT.
This deal between SAP, IBM and HP expands HP's market beyond users of the Oracle database. It also builds upon the HP/SAP alliance, a partnership that goes back more than decade to the initial development of R/3. Today, HP and SAP have 15 Competence Centers worldwide that offering ERP solutions based on SAP applications and HP platforms, support, financing, and education services.
The loser in all this is SAP's rival, and sometime partner, Oracle. In December SAP not only combined its software with DB2, but spurned Oracle by choosing the IBM database as its preferred development platform. Then about a week later, SAP again snubbed Oracle by announcing it was no longer using the Oracle database internally for Windows environments. Instead, SAP had selected Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 as the primary database for almost all its internal Windows development.