SAP and Microsoft tighten bonds

The Duet partnership between SAP and Microsoft has resulted in 200,000 licence sales in three months and plans call for an even more ambitious level of integration in the next year or so.

Duet connects Microsoft front-end productivity applications to data held in SAP in an attempt to make it easier for information workers to glean data from complex back-office systems. Most early adopters are using unmodified versions of the built-in scenarios provided by the first release of Duet but the expectation is that many will customise later, SAP said.

“There’s clearly a lot of demand,” said Prashanth Shetty, SAP director of solutions marketing. “The intention was to focus on horizontal markets and we’re finding business users are leaning to out-of-the-box scenarios but we’re fully aware we need to provide tools in order to scale the product.”

Starting from December, SAP said it plans to release “value packs” that add Office 2007 support and more scenarios including sales, travel and demand-planning management capabilities. In the summer, the firms plan to release Duet 1.5 with more scenarios plus configuration and customisation tools.

Further out, Duet 2.0 will be targeted at supporting more sophisticated environments.

“There’s tremendous interest in getting new line-of-business scenarios such as supply-chain management and CRM,” said Shetty. “We see the value packs and 1.5 releases as milestones but the big one is version 2.0.”

SAP has not set a public schedule for delivering the 2.0 release but Shetty said the company was shooting for the end of 2007.