For three decades, SAP and IBM have partnered to benefit their mutual customers. Both companies are among the industry leaders on numerous standards councils, and both are working to develop standards and build them into our solutions.

SAP NetWeaver offers interoperability, openness, and extensibility for IBM's software portfolio, including IBM WebSphere. This openness provides a foundation for effective management of heterogeneous systems and lower total cost of ownership.

Interoperability with IBM WebSphere takes place at the people, information, process, and application levels:

• People -- SAP NetWeaver enables you to develop portal content on your preferred platform. This protects your existing investments and accelerates content development. What's more, SAP NetWeaver is designed to support groupware and collaboration products such as Lotus.
• Information -- You need a high level of interoperability to access and aggregate information consistently. SAP is exploring integration scenarios between SAP NetWeaver and data management tools such as IBM Content Manager.
• Process -- Interoperability at the process level minimizes point-to-point connections, centralizes integration knowledge, and orchestrates processes that span technologies. SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure and IBM WebSphere Business Integration can coexist and exchange information at the message level, based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
• Application -- SAP NetWeaver Application Server supports platform-independent Web services, Web-based business applications, and application development based on open standards. It also supports technology standards such as XML, SOAP, Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), plus J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) and Java Message Service (JMS).

SAP and IBM are committed to continued cooperation through a joint Collaboration Technology Support Center, an important element of our partnership. This center enables SAP to continue to offer a high degree of interoperability -- and help you meet your enterprise needs.