Visa is pleased to be collaborating with SAP on the ISO 20022 standard because it helps the global financial industry provide secure, reliable, and valid information in financial transactions.

Joe Bugajski VP for Global Data Interoperability Visa International

Industry standards ensure that SAP's platform is open and interoperable with other vendor solutions in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, interoperability is one of the most challenging issues facing enterprises. It is hard to predict what kinds of systems will form a company's business network in the future.

The best way to hedge against this challenge is through industry standards. Working closely with companies in the SAP ecosystem, SAP leads initiatives in business semantic standards (UN/CEFACT), the banking industry, Web services interoperability, and open source support (OSS).

Benefits of industry standards occur only if you take a comprehensive approach that places equal importance on:

• Business semantics standards – Define the information flowing through and between enterprise applications
• Technology standards – Enable systems running those enterprise applications to more easily connect and communicate
• Open source – Provide SAP customers with a choice of technology platforms to use

Visit the SAP Developer Network (SDN) to participate in the discussion around standards and enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).