SAP and Microsoft aren’t strangers to product launch delays. So it
seems odd for SAP to be thinking about upgrades when it just barely got
the first version out the door a month ago.
But maybe it’s learning to limit its product
development excesses.
SAP, along with Microsoft, developed Duet, a product that allows users to interact with SAP enterprise software through a Microsoft Office interface.
Only out a month, Duet is already in line for enhancements.
Dennis Moore, general manager for emerging solutions at SAP, told
internetnews.com that the company is already discussing specific
enhancements with customers and will present an extended product roadmap in
the next quarter or two.
“We’ve been incorporating learnings back into the product and the
documentation of the product,” said Moore.
He added that SAP has been able to reduce implementation time by 30 percent
as a result of that feedback.
The strength of Duet is that it allows knowledge workers in enterprises
using SAP to interact with certain SAP applications tied to the calendar
functions, such as vacation scheduling, through Microsoft Office desktop
solutions.
“Duet is not porting SAP to Office. It’s about extending Office to
appropriate processes within SAP,” Moore explained.
In the short term, said Moore, future iterations of SAP will continue in the
same vein, extending that kind of capability to a greater range of SAP
applications, such as e-learning and recruiting.
Longer term, Moore said that users will be able to leverage Duet when they
work with a greater variety of unstructured data types.
For instance, managers will be able to build reports customized according to
key performance indicators.
“They’ll have tools to build their own reports using SAP data with Office,”
said Moore.
Moore’s optimism about Duet aside, the current product roadmap is not
without speed bumps.
SAP expects to generate incremental sales to current enterprise customers.
“The real market opportunity and real demand for Duet is information workers
who are not currently SAP users,” said Moore.
But those customers may not be so eager to tag along for the ride.
“Customers planning to
implement Duet expect to license only 46 percent of currently licensed SAP
users for Duet, and they expect to buy licenses for only 16 percent of users
currently without SAP licenses,” according to a report by Jim Murphy of AMR Research.
Moore said that for SAP, one of the advantages of Duet is that it has gotten
a closer look at the workers within enterprises to which it already sells.
Currently, SAP addresses no more than 30 percent of the employees in
enterprises where it has sold a license. The rest of them don’t use SAP, and
SAP has had little or no experience in dealing with them.
Duet has changed all that.
“SAP has learned a lot about information workers and the desktop,” he noted.
For example, customers aren’t thrilled with the usability of
standard SAP products. It has thus been working on a new user interface, dubbed Project Muse.
The new interface is intended to look much like a browser, which would tie
into SAP’s on-demand strategy.
Both Microsoft and
SAP
have spoken volumes about software as a service
recent months.
Could the companies be mulling an on-demand version of Duet?
Moore wouldn’t say.
“We’re not talking about Duet on-demand at this moment,” he said.
