Clothing retailer Chico's FAS Inc. in Fort Myers, Fla., will retain Microsoft .Net and other infrastructure technologies after it upgrades to SAP for Retail, which will also require NetWeaver, from a variety of older business applications, said CIO Gary King.

The company plans to roll out SAP for Retail by year's end, but it expects to use the NetWeaver technology only to support that application -- a costlier but more functional solution than using its other capabilities, King said.

At the conference, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann acknowledged that some SAP customers will support multiple technologies. "We said you can develop in a .Net environment for cases where people invested in .Net and didn't want to retrain," Kagermann said in an interview. Though he argued that NetWeaver supports non-SAP technologies, for some users, "you can't solve everything in life," he said.

In the long run, said Matthew Rickard, a director of groups and chapters at the Americas' SAP Users' Group, NetWeaver will become a fact of life for SAP customers.

"All our members at some point in time are going to have go to the ESA" if they continue using SAP products, Rickard said, referring to SAP's Enter-prise Services Architecture, whose key component is NetWeaver. "I don't think there is anyone who doesn't believe they aren't going there."