By Siobhan Kennedy

IBM Corp will team up with SAP AG next week to show off what Big Blue claims is the first working version of the ERP vendor’s mySAP.com initiative in a collaborative e-commerce environment. The two companies will use SAP’s Sapphire user show in Philadelphia to demonstrate how an enterprise could use SAP’s business to business (B2B) procurement application to buy products over the internet from a vendor running IBM’s Net.Commerce platform.

Net.Commerce is a set of integrated software components, powered by IBM DB2 Universal Database, that enables businesses to sell goods and services through an electronic catalog on the internet. SAP’s B2B procurement solution is designed to streamline the purchasing process for indirect goods and services, including Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO). By enabling the two to work through mySAP.com, the aim is to provide joint IBM/SAP customers with a fast, secure and cheaper way of conducting business over the web, IBM said.

John Sarsgood, IBM’s vice president, ERP solutions sales for America told ComputerWire that customers could integrate their Net.Commerce environments with SAP’s R/3 and B2B applications before. But this is the first time the companies have shown the software working through the mySAP.com collaborative marketplace – SAP’s business portal which allows users access to the ERP vendor’s front and back office applications, plus those of third party suppliers, over the web. Sapphire will be the first time SAP has shows off the portal – and the desktop mySAP.workplace version – having revealed all the technical underpinnings at its technical developers conference last week.

Also at the show, IBM will unveil its latest ERP benchmarking tests, which the company claims makes its RS/6000 platform the fastest and most reliable above all other vendors’ hardware for running SAP’s R/3 applications. IBM says the forthcoming version of its RS/6000 server – S8 – can support up to 16,640 concurrent users, which beats Sun’s previous record of 14,000. IBM also claims to be the first to break the 5 million barrier for the number of user R/3 interactions performed in an hour, clocking 5,007,000 requests during the S8 tests. This is equivalent to 1,669,000 fully business-processed order line items per hour, Big Blue says.

In addition, IBM and SAP are set to announce new, jointly developed SAP offerings for both the publishing and chemical industries while Tivoli Systems Inc will announce product enhancements to its application management solution for R/3 as well as unveiling its first international center of excellence for SAP in Waldorf, Germany.