NEW YORK—Dell Inc. and SAP AG are extending their eight-year alliance via enhanced services and support offerings, the chief executives of both companies said Wednesday at a press conference here.

Talking to about 60 reporters and analysts, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said that software products from enterprise applications market leader SAP offer the same value proposition to customers that his own company's products offer on the hardware side—lower cost of ownership and greater performance in an industry that is increasingly turning to industry-standard technologies.

"The enterprise is at an inflection point, where we are seeing things turning to a standards-based platform at an increasing rate," Dell said. "We want to accelerate that."

Henning Kagermann, chairman and CEO of Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, said customers are looking for the same proposition out of their software, a key reason for the company's NetWeaver integration layer, which brings together the myriad enterprise software offerings from SAP. "We [provide] mission-critical applications, so we have some customers that can run 90, 95 percent of their business on SAP," Kagermann said.

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