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.

It's no surprise, then, that SAP NetWeaver offers interoperability, openness, and extensibility for IBM WebSphere. This openness provides a foundation for effective management of heterogeneous systems.

Interoperability with IBM WebSphere takes place at the people, information, and process 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 require a high level of interoperability – in order to access and aggregate information consistently. SAP is exploring integration scenarios between SAP Knowledge Management 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 supports an environment in which SAP Exchange Infrastructure and IBM WebSphere Business Integration can coexist and exchange information.

Application Platform

SAP Web Application Server, a key component of SAP NetWeaver, supports platform-independent Web services, Web-based business applications, and application development based on open standards. SAP Web Application Server supports primary technology standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), plus J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA) and Java Message Service (JMS).

In addition, SAP has committed to continued cooperation with IBM through a joint Collaboration Technology Support Center, a new element of SAP's global partner strategy. This center will help SAP continue to offer a high degree of interoperability – and help you meet your enterprise needs.