John Blau of IDG News Service held a short interview with Vishal Sikka, SAP’s Senior Vice President of Architecture. 2 statements stood out for me:

Asked about the CRM on-demand offering Sikka says:

“What you see in our CRM on-demand offering is a significantly easier product to use through ways such as preconfiguration, fewer functions and taking massive advantage of underlying infrastructure. You’ll see us do things that go far beyond Salesforce.com. You’ll see us starting to work with some of the “cloud” platforms like Amazon and Google. We haven’t yet announced any relationships but you’ll start to see us doing things of this sort.”

It will be interesting to see what the collaboration with cloud platforms will entail.

When asked about the cooperation with Microsoft and Duet in particular, he responded:

“We have different development philosophies. Microsoft is much more volume oriented and more consumer focused. But we have a great relationship with them.”

This statement puzzles me slightly. OK, Microsoft is to a large extend putting software onto people’s desktop and the large majority of them are (end-) consumers, hence a larger installation base. But I can’t understand why the development philosophies are so different. I particularly don’t understand why MS is supposed to be more consumer focused. If I try to interpret this, does it mean -for example- MS puts more focus on UIs because they are more consumer oriented – and SAP less? Aren’t a lot of the great conversations that are happening on SDN and in the SAP Blogsphere trying to do exactly the opposite – making SAP more consumer focused (think of the Wiimote experiment as a lighthearted example)?