SAP Influencer Summit '09 exhibits evidence of the Microsoft connection

Source: The Clear Path Forward for the SAP Super Tanker...

Above blog reports on the SAP Influencer Summit held last week in Boston. At this summit, the mid-term future directions of SAP as IT and solutions company where presented to the audience of 275 analysts and IT influencers.

Noticable in the context of SAP / Microsoft interoperability are the following observations:

• Silverlight was formally named as the user interface surface of choice over Adobe’s Flex, and Sharepoint & Office interoperability is clearly seen as the path forward over that horizon. The dev environment is similarly on the .net side of the ocean.
• Excel and Crystal Reports (and SAP’s Xcelsius) are similarly foundational components to analytics reporting and dashboarding.

Makes me wonder: is SAP finally making a renewed stand on the integration and interoperability of the SAP and Microsoft platforms + products? The fact that noise and attention from SAP on the recently by Microsoft announced DUET Enterprise is yet effectively non-present, is at least confusing with the messages made at the summit. I guess we'll still have to wait and see whether and in which direction(s) the 2 companies will interoperate and partner.

Business announcement of Duet Enterprise

Today the expected announcement on the next version of Duet is made public.
At the PDC09 Duet Enterprise has been presented to the audience, followed by a press release. In my opinion, the PDC is somewhat of a strange location to announce Duet Enterprise. The PDC participants are mainly IT developers and architects. The (justifiable) first audience of the Duet Enterprise proposition is however business management. This is visible in the information disclosed so far (view the solution brief). It eluminates the (foreseen) business value of Duet Enterprise, to get more value out of your company's investments in both SAP and Microsoft environments.

Details about the product itself are not yet exposed; system architecture nor infrastructure. We'll still have to wait for that. The good news for now is that both SAP and Microsoft have committed themselves, and in a shared uptake, to invest strategic in Duet. That clear commitment had been lacking until now.

Expectations on DUET 3.0

With the forthcoming release of SharePoint 2010 in sight, it is clear that this will be the foundation application platform for other Microsoft products. Project Server, Business Intelligence strategy, Dynamics CRM, and so on. In context of SAP / Microsoft interoperability, it is interesting to watch what will happen with the DUET^TM offering, a joint SAP and Microsoft product. The DUET versions so far (1.0, 1.5) cannot be considered a success story in real practice. A lot of licenses are out there in the market (1 million licenses at 500 customers in the last 2 years), but almost no concrete applications. There are several reasons for that:

• The minimal set so far of supported SAP business packages / functionality
• The lack of development support in the current DUET^TM versions; to custom extend the minimal set
• The extra complexity and costs within the IT infrastructure due to the separate DUET server

SAP nor Microsoft have yet published the future roadmap of DUET^TM, nor recommitted themselves recently to continue this. However, several signals indicate that it will be continued, and that it will be re-architectured. For instance, at the SAP TECHED this week within Vienna it was told that DUET 3.0 will be based on SharePoint 2010. Talk of an unexpected surprise J. At the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 last week in Vegas, DUET was not or only marginally mentioned. I expect this to be intentionally, because DUET is a joint SAP + Microsoft happening; and they will use a common podium to present the [near] future roadmap of DUET^TM.

Information that is already leaking out:

• No more dedicated DUET server to handle the communications between SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft Office; but relying on the SharePoint 2010 platform/server to handle this
• UI aligned with next version of Office; Office 2010
• SAP potentially shifting away from Java in favor of ABAP (wonder why that could be…)
• Functionality around reporting and sales management, time management scenario’s

Given the foreseen dependency on a.o. SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, it will be clear that I do not expect the appearance of DUET 3.0 before around the end of 2010. Also interesting is in what sense DUET 3.0 will be dependent on the SAP NetWeaver (SAP’s Business Process Platform) roadmap: new capabilities, functional and technical. Once again, it is a joint uptaking by SAP and Microsoft; and it therefore requires alignment with the technology and business roadmaps of both companies. No simple action, but since the companies have a common interest here and a common opponent (Oracle), I’ll certainly expect them to come up with something significant. They simple have to.

Some interesting related and recent links:

• [Blog Steve Fox] SAP TECHED 2009
• [Blog Kristian Kalsing] The new DUET architecture
• [Blog Josh Greenbaum] DUET Lives! SAP and Microsoft’s Office Interface Still Alive and Kicking
• DUET 1.x & SAP: Architectural overview
• [Blog Kent Weare] TechEd 2009 - Day 5

Tags: SAP NetWeaver Microsoft SharePoint DUET integration interoperability HPW