For SAP, the pronouncements were accompanied by mutual barbs exchanged between it and Oracle, which presented on the previous day. And, before SAP’s session ended, a major customer confronted it about long implementation times.

Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group at SAP, kicked off the day by stating that suites would continue to be the sweet spot of the enterprise applications market.

He said that five years from now, customers would only buy suites, rather than separate applications for ERP, CRM, HR, or supply chain. Admittedly, that’s nothing startling to hear from SAP, or Oracle for that matter.

But Agassi added that the suites would become more industry-specific, and that partners would play a major role in reaching SAP’s goal to multiply today’s spectrum of roughly 400 offerings by a factor of ten.

Agassi was asked during his presentation whether SAP would focus on partnership or acquisition. The question had current relevance, given that SAP has just acquired Virsa Systems, an India-based provider of cross-enterprise compliance solutions. Agassi replied that SAP would make acquisitions for core technologies, but would continue promoting partnering for the rest.

Agassi joked that an Oracle VP tried to crash a recent SAP meeting for prospective NetWeaver partners. He said he was from a small company, Agassi said, adding the punch line, He wasn’t lying.

At the end of the presentation, Agassi was questioned by long-time customer Con Goedman, CIO for Shell Oil Company’s upstream (oil exploration) unit, about how long and how much it would cost to migrate to SAP’s SOA platform. Agassi replied that for a similar sized multinational with 19 instances, the migration plan was four years, which he considered to be an aggressive pace.

Speaking at a separate session later in the day, Goedman said that was much too long. Stating that Shell would never walk away from its hundreds of millions of dollars SAP investment, it would likely look elsewhere to get its SOA migration off the boards more quickly.

Later in the day, Microsoft also described how it planned to add more flavors to its enterprise desktop solutions. The difference, however, is that while SAP is looking to delineate by vertical industry, Microsoft is looking more to role-based or back-end application-based versions.

Simon Witts, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s enterprise and partner group, described Microsoft’s early experience with Siebel as the driver for exploiting Microsoft Office, so end users won’t have to adopt new tools or learn new applications.

Witts recounted that when Microsoft first implemented Siebel as standalone, relatively few used it. Once it was service-enabled and integrated with adjoining applications, such as customer service, and then populated through role-based SharePoint portals, usage soared.

And, although Microsoft already delivers an integration framework with BizTalk, Witts said simpler alternatives were still needed to serve the bulk of the enterprise. Given that SharePoint already has an installed base of 75 million users, he termed it a good place to start.

Witts also characterized Mendocino, the code name for the new SAP flavor of Microsoft Office, as the first proof of concept for the new flavors strategy. With Mendocino, Microsoft Office applications become the front end to SAP. Witts said that Microsoft would develop similar front ends for other common enterprise back end applications.