SAP and Microsoft duet together

According to this news item, Duet, the project formerly known as Mendocino, has been officially launched. The announcement was made earlier this week at a press conference held by Microsoft business division president Jeff Raikes and SAP product and technology group executive bored member / president Shai Agassi, SAP executive board member and president of the. The announcement also included the revelation of duet.com, plans for a staggered rollout and a road show to promote the product.

“The CRM customer base is going to have Duet capability by the end of this year,” proclaimed Agassi. Mikes Sisois, chief information officer at San Jose, Calif.-based semiconductor manufacturer Atmel Corp., has been running mySAP ERP 2004 in a sandbox with Duet, the newly branded Microsoft-SAP Mendocino software. His testimonial stated that “The main benefit of Duet accrues not so much to current full-time SAP users, Sisois said, but to the segment of occasional users who just need to pull reports, customer info, and the like on the fly.” Indeed Agassi stated that the very goal of Duet was to link everyday SAP tasks with the Microsoft Office environment familiar to end users.

“People are feeling a sense of information overload, and in some cases this leads to information underload … SAP’s leadership in the enterprise space is the thing we focused on jointly; in addition, we are each approaching how Office fits into the rest of our product lines.” Duet is aimed at large enterprise customers with revenues of $1 billion per year or more. The general availability of Duet is promised for June 2006. The Microsoft price is set at $125 per computer plus an additional $125 license per server.

Two value packs are being pushed by Microsoft as well; these will be released later in the year and are promised to add many scenarios and functionality, such as CRM, SCM and analytics, and will take advantage of the Duet capabilities of the Office 12 release, also slated for later in 2006. At the press conference, Agassi also promised that updates to Duet will “allow companies to build customized scenarios, and a developer pack will enable SAP partner ISVs to build, license and sell custom scenarios.” As far as future partnership deals between Microsoft and Sap, Agassi served up this reply: “This is a first … We’ll see how well this takes, and I’m sure that if it generates value for our two companies and our customers, we’ll talk again about future opportunities.”