ATLANTA — SAP AG and Microsoft yesterday announced plans to significantly extend their two-year-old Duet partnership, a move that reinforces Duet as an important part of SAP's strategy to open its enterprise applications to large numbers of nontraditional users, such as sales professionals.
At SAP's annual Sapphire customer conference here, where more than 15,000 attendees gathered, the company and Microsoft laid out a two-year roadmap for additional Duet joint development that will expand business scenarios that the tool supports and provide integration of Duet, formerly code-named Mendocino, with Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server portal product.
In unrelated news at Sapphire, SAP announced a new procurement product that will be delivered as an on-demand service; a new version of its NetWeaver middleware stack — including a new version of the NetWeaver Composition Environment; and more details related to its mid-market business suite, code-named A1S, which is under development.
Overall, SAP's top executives expressed confidence in the company's product strategy and growth potential. Despite recent market-share inroads claimed by archrival Oracle, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told reporters that he expects SAP to accelerate its growth rate, largely by attracting new mid-market customers migrating from older, legacy ERP systems. Kagermann, who estimates SAP's enterprise applications market share at 25%, predicted that the company could double its market share by 2010.
SAP's apparent renewed commitment to Duet is significant because it highlights the increasingly complex relationship between partners SAP and Microsoft. Two years ago, SAP enlisted Microsoft's help in creating Duet, which integrates the mySAP ERP system with Microsoft's widely used Office personal productivity desktop applications. Duet 1.0, which supported a few business scenarios, such as employee time reporting, was intended to present an easy-to-use interface that would be familiar to occasional and nontraditional SAP users.
Last month, however, the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) unit — which directly competes with SAP's business applications — announced its own Office-based user interface, which, Microsoft officials said, goes beyond Duet by including features such as tools that allow manufacturers to create their own business scenarios. Microsoft calls its tool Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint.
The extended Duet partnership, SAP officials said, means the company is prepared to compete against these newly enhanced applications from its partner, in some cases using similar Microsoft platforms.
"We will meet in the market and act as fair and honest competitors," said SAP's recently named deputy CEO, Leo Apotheker. "[MBS] will not have any impact on what we are going to do with Duet."
SAP officials said that 250 customers have signed up for Duet, buying 400,000 user licenses for the product.
The new Duet features promised by SAP and Microsoft will come in three phases over the next two years. Later this year, the partners will deliver Duet support for new business scenarios, including sales and supply chain management. Next year, said Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's Business Division (which includes MBS), Microsoft and SAP will deliver support for additional scenarios, plus integration with Microsoft's SharePoint Server portal product, which can be used to manage unstructured data and enable collaboration. Integration with SharePoint Server will allow SAP's Duet users to create and develop their own scenarios, much like Microsoft business application users can do with the Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint. And, in 2009, Raikes said, Duet will integrate with the next versions of SAP's business suite and Microsoft's Office applications and Foundation infrastructure.
SAP's extended commitment to Duet came as welcome news to some manufacturing customers attending Sapphire. Cindy Ireland, senior director of information systems at medical diagnostics equipment manufacturer Gen-Probe Inc., said the company plans to deploy Duet in connection with its mySAP ERP 2004 system once Gen-Probe has upgraded its Microsoft Office environment near the end of the year. The company sees an opportunity to use Duet to help project managers more easily track where and how they spend time and resources.
SAP's and Microsoft's roadmap for Duet will, however, cause Gen-Probe to reevaluate its portal strategy. Gen-Probe uses both Microsoft's SharePoint and SAP's Enterprise Portal, each for different applications. With SharePoint support built into Duet, Ireland said, "we will have to reconcile which portal to standardize on — Microsoft's or SAP's."
In a related move at Sapphire, SAP also announced a new partnership with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Co. to deliver the Duet software pre-installed on HP ProLiant servers.
In other news at Sapphire, SAP announced plans to enhance the NetWeaver platform, including plans to deliver new versions of the NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE) and NetWeaver Process Integration (PI), both of which can be used to author Web services and build composite applications on top of the NetWeaver platform.
The new version of NetWeaver CE includes standard Java EE5-based development tools that make it easier to create Web services that operate across heterogeneous platforms, said SAP's head of NetWeaver technology, Klaus Kreplin, in an interview with Managing Automation.
The new NetWeaver Process Integration tool includes a service bus that can be used to connect composite applications with enterprise services, as well as an Enterprise Services Repository that complies with the UDDI 3.0 standard.
Other enhancements to the NetWeaver environment include new user interface support for Web 2.0 standards such as AJAX.
While the NetWeaver enhancements will make the environment more standards-based and easier to use for creating and managing Web services, it still does not include a business process management tool, based on the BPEL language, that customers could use to easily model business processes and translate those models into executable code. This long-awaited feature of NetWeaver, Kreplin said, is likely to appear in the next major NetWeaver release in the first half of next year.
CEO Kagermann said 13,000 of SAP's customer sites have implemented some combination of NetWeaver products, up from 5,881 a year ago.
SAP also used Sapphire to:
- Reveal an updated roadmap for the next generation of its core Business Process Platform suite of enterprise applications. CEO Kagermann said that later this year SAP will complete the service-enabling of all of its current core application suites except Business One, SAP's product for small companies. In 2008, SAP is expected to roll out a new, on-demand application suite, currently code-named A1S. Designed for companies with 50 to 500 employees, A1S will join SAP's Business One and All-in-One products for small and medium-sized businesses.
SAP Supervisory Board Chairman and founder Hasso Plattner, in a Sapphire keynote address, said A1S will be entirely service-enabled, making it easy to deploy in a modular fashion. And, in addition to being deployed as an on-demand offering, A1S will be model-based, making it easier to configure and extend, Plattner said, noting that the new offering will include a faster in-memory database and embedded, real-time analytics.
In 2009, according to Kagermann, SAP will roll out a new version of its Business Process Platform based on the design principles used in the new mid-market product. And, in 2010, he said, upgrade cycles on all of SAP's products will be synchronized.
- Announced plans for a new on-demand e-sourcing application. SAP said the new offering — named SAP E-Sourcing — will include an easy migration path to SAP's on-premise Supplier Relationship Management product and will support activities such as online auctions and RFP events. SAP expects the sourcing product to compete against other on-demand e-sourcing services, such as those from Ketera Inc. and Ariba. The product is available in the United States for an introductory price of $10,000.