Agassi: MySQL to support SAP this year

Agassi: MySQL to support SAP this year

(InfoWorld) - On the heels of its venture capital (VC) investment in MySQL AB, SAP is readying its enterprise software to run on the Swedish company's open-source database.

Shai Agassi, president of SAP's products and technology group, said Thursday he expects MySQL to be certified to run SAP applications by the end of the year.

"I'm sure [MySQL] will be supported," Agassi said during an appearance with fellow SAP executives Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker in Burlingame, California Thursday. Agassi and the rest of SAP's Executive Board were in town for their annual meeting, the second in a row the team has held in Silicon Valley.

Agassi responded to criticism that SAP is less friendly toward open source as a development model as some competitors are with a reminder that SAP "shipped our applications into the market with our source open to people for modification for ages."

That move brought mixed results, he said. "Sometimes it was great for the customers, sometimes it wasn't great for the customers," Agassi said.

It was from this experience that SAP came up with its strategy to re-architect its applications on a service-oriented architecture, which it currently is in the process of doing.

In this way, the company can keep its back-end application code intact, while giving customers a variety of options for integrating their business processes with SAP applications through open interfaces to them, Agassi said.

"We're finding a demarcation -- which areas should they touch and which areas they shouldn't," he said. "The service interface is the line under which you should not come in and alter the code."

SAP's venture arm announced its investment in MySQL in February. The investment was part of $18.5 million in Series C funding the Uppsala, Sweden-based company secured from investors that included not only SAP but also Intel Corp.

[via InfoWorld]