Around 70 participants were present at the IT Business Network event held jointly by SAP and Microsoft on February 15. If any of the attendees were unfamiliar with the longstanding partnership between the two software giants, they may have found the harmonious atmosphere somewhat odd. Although their product portfolios do overlap in a number of areas, including in the cloud and specific business applications, there was no sign of rivalry at this event.

As Goran Guliš of SAP Germany’s ecosystem and partner group emphasized in his opening address, every SAP user is also a Microsoft customer on some level. Practical experience has shown that power users – those who only use SAP GUI – account for just 3% of SAP’s user base. The remaining 85-97% utilize a Microsoft Office front end, have numerous interfaces to other systems at their disposal, and employ their own applications. A heterogeneous IT landscape is part of most companies’ everyday reality. Therefore, the strategic partnership that SAP and Microsoft have maintained since 1993 makes a lot of sense.

The two companies’ collaborative efforts mainly focus on the joint product Duet Enterprise. In addition, SAP software now runs on Microsoft SQL servers, which has earned Microsoft the status of “SAP Global Launch Partner for SQL.” Meanwhile, at the beginning of the IT Business Network event, Kay Jeschke – program manager for the COO Germany area at SAP Germany – surprised those in attendance with a demo of a very special product: SAP HANA with support for motion control through Microsoft Kinect.

Standing in front of his laptop and the Kinect sensor bar like an orchestra director, Jeschke simply gestured with his hands and arms to carry out real-time analyses, with the SAP HANA appliance software processing over three billion data records at every turn of his body. While it has mainly seen use in living rooms on Xbox 360 thus far, the technology is also on its way into the world of business following Microsoft’s announcement of its intention to bring Kinect to Windows PCs.

Those interested in taking Kinect for a spin will have a chance to do so in early March at CeBIT, where Microsoft will have the motion control hardware ready for testing at its Kinect room in Hall 4.

The pages that follow offer more details on the other products SAP and Microsoft have developed together, including:

• Duet Enterprise: connecting PCs and SAP applications
• SAP and Bing Maps
• SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation