CIOIN

In an attempt to ease cloud deployments for their combined customer base, Microsoft and SAP are configuring some of their software products so that they work more easily together.

SAP will expose some of the functionality in SAP software so it can be readily harnessed within the Microsoft .Net platform as well as from the Microsoft Azure cloud computing service. These tweaks should speed development of .Net applications that interact with SAP programs, as well as make it easier to connect Azure cloud applications to internal SAP systems, the two companies said.

In addition to this work, SAP plans to integrate as-yet unnamed but about-to-be-released landscape management software with Microsoft's Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology.

With the .Net integration, developers will be able to tap SAP's NetWeaver Gateway connectivity framework without possessing any specific knowledge of how to use Gateway. When building applications, developers can use the Gateway to build applications that draw data from the SAP Business Suite applications. The integration technologies will be available as an add-on to future editions of Visual Studio, as well as in modifications to the .Net framework.

The partnership will also provide an SDK software development kit for bridging Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform with NetWeaver Gateway. This SDK will allow developers to bridge their in-house SAP systems with Azure-based deployments.

This is not the first time the two companies have partnered. Earlier this year they released Duet Enterprise, software that connects Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with SAP's ERP applications.