SAP's Big Bankroll

Locked in a struggle with Oracle(ORCL Quote) and IBM(IBM Quote) to dominate the software landscape, SAP (SAP Quote) is making small but carefully targeted investments in innovative companies.

The German software giant has run its own venture arm for a decade, but now the company has started a new fund that will funnel money to partner companies that are developing applications around NetWeaver, SAP's software platform.

SAP expects the investments to be profitable. But the real goal of the fund is finding companies that will propagate NetWeaver, a large and complex set of software that competes with Oracle's Fusion Middleware and IBM's WebSphere, says Zia Yusuf, an executive vice president at SAP and co-manager of the company's NetWeaver Fund.

SAP, whose initial investment of $125 million in the NetWeaver Fund isn't large, will not sink more than $5 million into any of the companies that NetWeaver backs. And unlike the typical venture fund, Yusuf's organization will only talk to companies that already have a solid working relationship with SAP and have technology that will add value to NetWeaver.

But the NetWeaver Fund, says Gartner analyst Yvonne Genovese, is part of a much larger plan. "Building an ecosystem is the most important thing SAP can do. Ultimately, SAP wants to make itself the de facto standard for software," she says.