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Microsoft, SAP Deepen Partnership to Blend Cloud Offerings

Microsoft and SAP on Tuesday announced plans to integrate their respective cloud-based systems, allowing the SAP HANA database to work with Microsoft Azure, which will enable Office 365 to communicate directly with SAP enterprise apps.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and SAP CEO Bill McDermott sat down before a packed audience at SAP's annual Sapphire Now convention in Orlando, Fla., where they outlined how the enhanced partnership will benefit customers and transform the companies' respective positions in the enterprise cloud business.

"What we've done is taken the best of SAP and the best of our hyperscale cloud and brought it together," Nadella told attendees.

Microsoft Curbs Cortana in Windows 10

Microsoft on Thursday announced that it was restricting its Cortana digital assistant to operating with the Edge browser and Bing search engine in Windows 10.

"As Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent [its] design and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana," said Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's general manager of search and Cortana.

"The result is a compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable," he added. "The continuity of these types of task completion scenarios is disrupted if Cortana can't depend on Bing as the search provider and Microsoft Edge as the browser."

Cortana, Edge and Bing are integrated to provide a better search experience, Gavin explained.

Reaction to the Move

"Of course, this doesn't negate [other browsers], but Microsoft is counting on the fact that using Cortana really kind of obviates the use of the browser in the first place," noted Mike Jude, program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

"If you're asking Cortana, do you care how it's linking to its information?" he asked.

"This stuff sounds like a bunch of 5-year-olds having a fight in the sandbox: If they're not going to work with us, we're not going to work with them," suggested Laura DiDio, a research director at Strategy Analytics.

"To a certain extent, Microsoft has a point, but this is a throwback to 1995 when everybody had a proprietary dog in the fight," she told TechNewsWorld. "Today we're supposed to have done with these things."

However, Cortana "is an AI interface to search, integrated as a feature in both Windows 10 and in Bing," noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at theEnderle Group.

"It's basically a voice interface into Microsoft's search technology," he told TechNewsWorld, "and getting it to interface equally well with anyone else's search engine would be problematic, because you'd need to be pretty intimate with them. I wouldn't describe Microsoft's relationship with Google as intimate."