DUET: Dead Until Each Turns

When SAP and Intel announced Pandesic at Sapphire in 1997, an SAP executive told me they did it basically because Intel paid them to. There was a certain casualness to the comment and the venture collapsed 3 years later.

I got a similar vibe this week about Duet - the joint offering from SAP and Microsoft. An SAP executive said "give us credit for thinking beyond MS Office" in designing Duet. In the meantime a Microsoft blogger points out "And for some ERP vendors, the ones who have been shipping incomprehensible software for 20 years, well, making the transition to this new world of work will be a challenge similar to the one faced by the guy who decides he wants to lose 40 pounds the night before his high school reunion.”

Charlie Wood summarizes it best "Ultimately I think Duet is a fantastic prototype of what's to come: solutions for exposing enterprise applications within familiar desktop tools. But where Duet is a proprietary, one-off integration, we will soon see generalized integration capabilities built on the lightweight, open standards of RSS and Microsoft's own RSS extensions, which add support for structured data and synchronization."

5-6 years ago, Duet would have been innovative. Now with a variety of mobile and SaaS applications and interfaces, MS Office integration is a nice-to-have. If SAP and Microsoft put their hearts into it.  

Comments

[Jan Karstens]

I agree that this offer could have been on the market earlier. Still, I would like to file in my leave requests via Outlook rather than a SAP GUI.
Charlie's comment irretates me. Just compare:
"...Duet is a proprietary, one-off integration,..."
"...open standards of RSS and Microsoft's own RSS extensions..."
I have seen enough of Microsoft's extensions to standards. I expect this one to be as open standard as the others.

[Dennis Moore]

Vinnie --

Interesting point of view, but I have a totally different perspective on the "vibe" than you have -- I think Duet will be a big success. I guess this should come as no surprise, as Duet is in my group at SAP along with Lewis Levin's group at Microsoft, and I feel like the "father" of this effort. I respect your opinion and hope you feel the same towards mine -- chacun à son goût (to each his own! I enjoyed the blogger round-table we did at SAPPHIRE that preceded this blog post of yours.

As to SAP efforts with others, I think we have a few great successes for every failure out there. Our collaboration with the Oracle DBMS produced real enterprise scalability for both. Our collaboration with Windows and SQL Server delivered a cost-effective platform for enterprise applications. Similar benefits and progress has been made with Eclipse, Java, RIM (Blackberry), and many others. A lot of these efforts are not as lightweight as a Google Maps mashup (which we have, btw), but they *are* available with global support backed by Microsoft and SAP, 24x7, lots of languages, able to scale to the enterprise, etc.

Keep on blogging, keep us on our toes with pointed and valid criticism and issues, and I look forward to meeting you again at SAPPHIRE next time -- or anywhere else!

Dennis Moore
General Manager, Emerging Solutions
SAP

[vinnie mirchandani]

Dennis, thanks. If you and Lewis keep that level of passion up on either side, it sure would change my perspective! Good to see you last week.

[Ankush Joshi]

Vinnie,

The success of DUET will be driven by Customers and third party integrators. The business scenarios, very specific ones for a typical company and Shadow Processes, can now be implemented in SAP environment.

The value this brings to customers is very high and can not be easily ignored.

I believe the customers will drive the success and eventually force SAP and Microsoft to work together, no matter what.

[Sangeeta Patni]

I think MS Office integration is a smart thing to do, for SAP and Microsoft both.

The end-users, however, will win when MS office interfaces extend to not just SAP, but other other enterprise applications and data sources as well. And yes, it should not require a "value pack" to extend its functionality.

-Sangeeta Patni,
Extensio Software, Inc.