Bryan McCutchan: SAP Global Technical Manager
Indeed, welcome to our SAP technology team blog where, as the introduction states below, it's our hope that you will find valuable information from the technical team on the Microsoft SAP alliance. As the “SAP Global Technical Manager”, I’m responsible for our global SAP technical pre-sales strategy and working with and supporting our strategic customers that run SAP applications with Microsoft technologies. Now what does that really mean? I want to make sure that we have the right technical resources in place that help customers choose and best run the Microsoft platform (Windows, SQL Server) and/or technologies (.NET, BizTalk, SharePoint, etc.) for their SAP environment(s).
Now in my 10th year of working with SAP on the Windows platform, I do continue to be excited about all that we’re doing with SAP. On a daily basis, I have conversations with customers and partners about how yes, Microsoft is “enterprise ready” and especially now with the topic of SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft .NET interoperability, helping guide them to make the right decisions specific for their business.
Both SAP and Microsoft have come along way over the past decade…ah, the days of “just” SAP R/3 (and when, back in the “old days”, I had to have my handy German to English dictionary to read the error messages!). Now of course, there’s SAP NetWeaver, mySAP ERP, BW, EP, XI, MDM, SCM, CRM, and more. All of these applications run on the Microsoft Windows/SQL Server platform and yes, we have come along way as well from Windows NT 3.5 and SQL 6.5 to now Windows Server 2003 and the just released SQL Server 2005.
While the majority of our efforts over the past 13 years of our alliance with SAP have been about the platform (Windows/SQL - and those efforts certainly successfully continue…I could get into market share numbers and the like, but being that this is a technical blog, I’ll spare you), within the past couple of years, we’ve formally embarked into a new era with SAP regarding interoperability. As Daz mentioned, we signed an interoperability agreement with SAP in 2004 that laid the foundation for SAP and Microsoft technologies working together and we then announced "Mendocino" (Office and SAP integration) earlier this year.
Finally, go to https://www.microsoft-sap.com for more information about our SAP alliance. There you can find technical whitepapers, case studies, events, a growing forum for those in the Microsoft SAP technical community, information on our partners, and general news. Thanks for your time and I look forward to sharing more thoughts in the near future.
Bryan...