SAP To Woo J2EE, .Net Developers

At its annual TechEd developers conference this week in Las Vegas, the ERP giant will follow up its previously announced NetWeaver development plan with support and programs to bring Java and .Net developers into a fold once dominated by ABAP specialists. ABAP is SAP's venerable and proprietary programming language.

"We're reaching out our arms to a much broader development group. SAP developers are no longer just using ABAP but Java and .Net," said Bill Wohl, vice president of product public relations for SAP America, Newtown Square, Pa. Parent SAP AG is based in Walldorf, Germany.

SAP will devote resources and tools to "cultivate this community spirit and build a fertile environment for this community," he said. The company will not delve into the nitty-gritty of certifications yet but will outline both virtual and literal resources to train programmers and furnish them with sample code, discussion forums, education and toolkits, he said.

Wohl stressed that SAP will continue to support traditional ABAP developers, but said it is critical to get Java and .Net skills into the enterprise application arena as well.

"We know from customers that the biggest single challenge is attracting, training and retaining developers who work on their systems," Wohl said.

Early this year, SAP launched what it touted as its language-agnostic NetWeaver development game plan. NetWeaver comprises an application framework and bundles an application server, an enterprise portal, collaboration software and integration broker. Pieces of that conglomeration put SAP in competition with BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, which offer their own app servers and/or portals and which, in varying degrees, also partner with SAP.

At its launch last January, NetWeaver was seen as SAP's way of navigating the treacherous straits between the .Net development world pushed by Microsoft and the J2EE-centric development world espoused by nearly every other ISV from IBM to Sun Microsystems. SAP is not alone in trying to balance those competitive worldviews. Enterprise software vendor Siebel Systems has likewise committed to supporting both .Net and J2EE development regimes (see story).

Meanwhile, PeopleSoft last spring hedged earlier Microsoft-centric bets with an IBM alliance intended to bring all of its software to Linux by year's end (see story). SAP is also supporting Linux.