SAP Australia Managing Director Geraldine McBride and Microsoft Australia Managing Director Steve Vamos were on stage for the launch party this week singing the joys of their new partnership which has been dubbed Duet.

Duet is a new product that links SAP's business applications with Microsoft's Office desktop software.

The tool for accessing SAP ERP (enterprise resource management) and CRM (customer relationship management) data via the Outlook interface is available locally now and both companies are "aligning efforts."

The stage show began with McBride announcing that SAP and Microsoft are the "best two software companies in the world."

Both managing directors were keen to talk about cooperation, not competition. But the reality is both companies are in direct competition in the enterprise application market.