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A recent collaboration by two tech companies is a win-win venture.

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Companies have always had good reasons to form partnerships, but the down economy is highlighting two of them: gaining access to new capabilities and sharing the risks of a new venture.

SAP AG (SAP) and Sybase Inc. (SY) cited both when unveiling their new partnership. Using Sybase’s mobile-enterprise-application platform, they will develop a version of SAP’s Business Suite software to run on the iPhone, Windows Mobile and other devices. “This is potentially a very, very big business,” said Bill McDermott, president of SAP’s global field operations. Mobile “is going to be the way of life in the future,” added John Chen, Sybase’s chairman, CEO and president.

Although this is the first major collaboration between the two companies, McDermott said he and Chen have often explored the idea of collaborating during the nine years that they have known each other. Customers’ growing interest in accessing corporate applications over cell phones created a logical focal point for a jointly produced product, and the economic downturn made the timing right, the leaders said following a press event held at the New York Stock Exchange in March.

“We call it co-innovation,” McDermott said before he and Chen rang the closing bell at the Exchange. McDermott added: “It is unrealistic for SAP to try to re-create what Sybase has done in mobile middleware,” the software that allows applications to be created only once but deployed on many different mobile operating platforms. “Similarly, for Sybase to re-create what we have is unrealistic. Together we can be more impactful.”

When companies agree to collaborate, they generally get less per-unit revenue than if they were developing a product themselves, and they may have to accept somewhat lower profit margins as well. But both McDermott and Chen said those were tradeoffs they were willing to make in return for reaching the market faster and sharing the costs of product development. The two indicated that one of the first products the partnership will produce is an application that lets sales professionals access data and interact with their companies’ back-end customer-relationship-management systems from their cell phones when out of the office.

In May, Sybase announced another strategic partnership, this one with Samsung SDS Co., to deliver the new Samsung SDS Enterprise Mobile Service, based on the industry-leading Sybase Unwired Platform. “When times are bad, you need more friends,” said Chen. “You can’t do it alone.”