Windows 2000 and mySAP.com Prove to Be a Powerful Combination; Memory Corp. and August Koehler AG Benefit From Strength and Scalability Of SAP Solutions for Windows 2000

Business Wire, Feb 10, 2000

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

WALLDORF, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 2000

SAP AG (NYSE:SAP), the leading provider of inter-enterprise software solutions and a Windows 2000 Global Launch Partner, today announced early market momentum from customers who recognize the value of combining Microsoft technologies with their mySAP.com solutions.

The combination of Windows 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and mySAP.com provides corporations around the world with a high-performance, highly reliable and scalable platform for today's challenging e-business relationships. The benefits of running SAP(TM) offerings on Windows 2000 include lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and more efficient administration of heterogeneous environments.

More than 10,000 installations of SAP solutions run on the Microsoft Windows platform worldwide -- a strong testimonial to the reliability, scalability and value of the SAP and Microsoft platform for e-business and inter-enterprise environments. Two companies already benefiting from the combination of SAP solutions on Windows 2000 are Memory Corp. plc and August Koehler AG.

Memory (soon to be renamed dig plc), a United Kingdom-based Internet appliance and entertainment company, is currently implementing mySAP.com and Windows 2000 as its strategic Internet solution. &uot;mySAP.com and Windows 2000 together are making our vision a reality,&uot; said David Savage, chief executive officer of dig plc. &uot;Our aggressive plans both for the design and manufacture of data storage hardware and for the aggregation and delivery of online content require a scalable, end-to-end e-business solution. mySAP.com and Windows 2000 will provide the digital infrastructure we need to roll out our dig-Music.com family of genre-specific, localized Internet sites in the United States, the United Kingdom, Holland and Scandinavia during the first half of the year.&uot;

Since July 1999, August Koehler, a Germany-based paper manufacturer with operations in Europe and North America, has been a pilot customer of Windows 2000 and SAP solutions. &uot;We have an SAP test and development environment running effectively on Windows 2000,&uot; said Alexander Fischer, team leader, IT Basics, August Koehler. &uot;We are very pleased with the results so far, and we're considering the migration of all our SAP solutions to the Windows 2000 platform later this year.&uot;

SAP will provide support for Windows 2000 on the day of the official launch of this new platform next week, making SAP one of the first companies in the industry to utilize the benefits of Windows 2000. More than 60 percent of all new installations of SAP software use the Microsoft Windows platform as the preferred operating system.

&uot;Microsoft Windows 2000 and mySAP.com is a very powerful and high-quality business solution for corporations around the world,&uot; said Steve Ballmer, president and CEO of Microsoft Corp. &uot;We've had a long and successful relationship with SAP, with over 10,000 SAP installations worldwide using Windows NT. At Microsoft, we've run our own implementation of SAP solutions on Windows 2000 since last August as part of our overall campaign to ensure that Windows 2000 is the most reliable platform for mission-critical computing. And it has run beautifully. We see incredible opportunities for our joint customers to develop their business Internet strategies using mySAP.com and Microsoft Windows 2000.&uot;

&uot;Customers are telling us that Windows 2000 enriches the value of the mySAP.com offerings, providing the basis for scalability, performance and availability,&uot; said Karl-Heinz Hess, member of the extended executive board of SAP AG. &uot;The partnership between SAP and Microsoft enables customers to better prepare for the demands of the Internet economy.&uot;

SAP and Microsoft have been engaged in a successful technology alliance since 1993, based on the original release of SAP software on the Windows platform. The alliance strives to integrate Microsoft and SAP offerings to enable the companies' mutual customers to derive maximum benefit. Recently, the alliance has expanded again with the announcement of a joint field sales engagement program in the EMEA region (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

About SAP

As the market leader of inter-enterprise software solutions, SAP is leveraging its strength in industry-focused business software and the world's largest enterprise software customer base to deliver mySAP.com. mySAP.com provides an open collaborative business environment of personalized solutions on demand. This enables companies of all sizes and industries to fully engage their employees, customers and partners to capitalize upon the new Internet economy. mySAP.com allows people to harness the power of the Internet to work smarter, better and faster by optimizing supply chains, managing strategic relationships, reducing time to market, sharing virtual information, and increasing productivity and shareholder value. SAP is listed on several exchanges including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol &uot;SAP.&uot; The SAP World Wide Web site can be found at http://www.sap.com.