SAPs executive board member and sales guru Leo Apothecker, Shai Agassi, head of product development, and SAP's CEO Henning Kagermann comment on SAP's company reinvention efforts and its strategy for competing with little guys in a bid to steal market share from U.S. rivals, including Microsoft, Oracle, Sage, and Salesforce.com. SAPs plan is to establish new sales and distribution channels with various partners and to restructure its whole sales process to concentrate on higher volume, lower-priced deals. Mr Apotheker's efforts have been in the area of making SAP customer-centered, and he hired Bill McDermott as CEO to improve U.S. operations. SAP once again became first in the U.S. market in its traditional market segments in 2004. Microsoft and SAP subsequently co-developed a new product code-named Mendocino that will permit office workers to enter data into a SAP system through Microsoft Outlook and Excel. SAP is depending heavily on its NetWeaver technology, which is meant to connect multiple generations of incompatible software that is used in many corporations. This offering will directly compete with IBM WebSphere and Microsoft BizTalk. SAP is expanding its NetWeaver partner network to include such industry leaders as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, Adobe Systems, and Symantec. SAP is competing with Oracle Project Fusion, but has already delivered a standard-based integrated NetWeaver platform. SAP and Oracle are also competing for small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) customers, as is Microsoft. SAP claims 80% of Fortune Global 1000 companies as SAP customers, and about 67% of its 27,000 customers are SMBs, a market that SAP intends to expand.