I was lucky to escape from Boston alive. Udo Waibel, who heads the SAP Duet team, and Harald Stuckert, who recently took organizational responsibility for the team, both gave me hell for my post Death to Duet? Actually they were very nice about it, and I apologized for the title.
But now that I am safely a few hundred miles away let me repeat a couple of questions -)
a) can SAP clarify the positioning of Business Objects, vis-a-vis Duet? I got from the Summit that BO like Duet was being positioned as a tool for role based business users but more around unstructured data, with Duet more around structured data. But other SAP tools offer similar functionality and appears imperative SAP explains, then rationalizes, its analytical alphabet soup.
b) Why is integration with MS Excel, introduced in 1985, considered innovative in 2007? Harald started to explain to me how complex the integration technology underlying Duet is, but between MS and SAP's resources I must admit I am scratching my head.
I invited Udo to start a conversation on the blog. Hope he does.
