At the Sapphire in Atlanta Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division, joined Leo Apotheker, deputy CEO of SAP, to share the extended product roadmap for Duet software, a solution that allows information workers to interact with SAP business processes and data through Microsoft Office applications, including SharePoint.

In the upcoming versions 2.0 - planned for 2008 - and 3.0 - planned for after the next generation of Microsoft Office and SAP Business Suite - both companies plan to enhance Duet with additional business scenarios, platform capabilities and development tools.

Below are some excerpts from a Q&A

PressPass: Tell us a little about the success of Duet to date.

Raikes: The first version of the solution has been in market just over one year and it's had unprecedented adoption. Customer response has been incredibly positive. Together with SAP we have more than 250 customers with more than 400,000 user licenses. The partner community is as, if not more, enthusiastic and we are working hard together to train and accredit our partners with nearly 100 of them around the world already trained to help our customers.

We attribute this success to a few things. First, after meeting with dozens of customers it's clear to us that they not only immediately see the value of Duet, they're excited about the opportunities it creates for their people and businesses. Additionally, so many Fortune 500 global companies have bet their IT strategy on Microsoft and SAP, for us to come together and create a solution that bridges those investments is delivering on their needs in a way that individually we could not.

The partner ecosystem interest has also been incredible. Partners are most interested in the ability to extend and customize Duet, so this news, for them, is particularly exciting. With the new scenarios and increased support for SharePoint Sever in Duet 2.0 and a comprehensive set of developer tools for customization and to build new scenarios in Duet 3.0 we're increasing the partner opportunity significantly.

PressPass: With this news, it seems that SharePoint plays an increasingly significant role in future versions of Duet. Why is that?

Raikes: We continue to see tremendous market momentum for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server with more than 85 million licenses. Microsoft Office has evolved so that the traditional client applications like microsoft excel and Outlook exist more and more on both the client and the server to enable new scenarios, and that server is Microsoft Office SharePoint. SAP and Microsoft together see the value in leveraging SharePoint for deeper collaboration capabilities and what we call "people-driven processes." In Duet 2.0 you'll see scenarios that will leverage SharePoint, and with Duet 3.0, SharePoint becomes a significant part of the platform for Duet.

PressPass: Is the success of Duet an indicator of more to come from the Microsoft and SAP partnership?

Raikes: Without a doubt, our customers want to see that happen. When two companies come together the way Microsoft and SAP have for Duet, it opens up a dialogue and an opportunity to learn from each other and identify ways to better serve a mutual customer base. We're continuing to talk with SAP about both extending Duet as well as other opportunities where we can come together to better serve our customers.

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Prashanth Rai