(March 18, 2002) - German software giant SAP took advantage of the world media interest in the CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany, last week to make an announcement that shows how carefully even giants these days are choosing to tread, so as to avoid taking definitive sides in the brooding J2EE vs .NET platform war as Web services become steadily more and more pervasive.

SAP committed at Hannover to writing "connectors" to .NET, a move which sends a clear signal that the company does not wish to be thought of as "Java-only" despite the fact that its own application server (In-Q-My) is a J2EE app server and despite the fact that the next version (6.2) of In-Q-My will run in parallel both Java and its own ABAP - advanced business application programming - execution environment (ABAP is SAP's own object-oriented language for back-end systems).

But Peter Barth, director of technology marketing for SAP, admitted that the arrangement with Microsoft isn't about actually deploying on .NET, and that SAP will "not be writing code in C#." In other words, SAP isn't talking about the same kind of tight integration with .NET that it's planning with the Java platform. So experts are saying that it looks like Microsoft won't be selling vast amounts of servers into SAP installations anytime soon.

But they're also saying that SAP is boxing clever. While the CeBIT announcement refers to integration with .NET only at the interface and portal level and doesn't involve actual deployment on .NET servers, it nonetheless shows that SAP knows that some of its existing clients might well soon be writing code in C# and using the Visual Studio .NET development environment.

So, while a J2EE version of the mySAP Portal developer's kit will ship later this year, already by 2003 companies with .NET-based applications will be able to integrate them with mySAP thanks to a .NET version of the kit currently being prepared.

When originally announcing its commitment to Java last November, SAP's co-CEO Hasso Plattner stressed that SAP would phase out C and C++ in favor of Java only when wholly satisfied that it met all performance criteria, so it is a slight surprise that SAP is already paving the way for .NET (and therefore C#) interoperability. But the "connector" strategy conforms with Plattner's desire to position SAP's application, portal, and exchange servers as a viable platform on which companies can run all sorts of Web services applications - and not only SAP's own proprietary apps.

SAP has been a longtime supporter and implementer of SOAP and WSDL, and is a founding member of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), as reported by WSJ News Desk last month.

"Utilizing Web services to build their infrastructure will allow SAP to achieve their goal of wide platform support," said WSJ editor-in-chief Sean Rhody. "The ability to provide this interface, regardless of the underlying implementation removed the question of platform support and returns it to who has the best functionality, which is clearly where SAP's strength lies. SAP will work with .NET, it just won't be run on .NET".