Duet, an SAP-Microsoft Office integration product, will be updated in 2008, and a third version is on the drawing board according to an announcement made at Sapphire 2007, SAP's semiannual customer conference. Co-developed by Microsoft and SAP, Duet lets workers access the mySAP suite of business applications using Office applications, such as Outlook. The Sapphire announcement reassures existing customers that Duet will not be dropped and promises partners the opportunity to extend the product, but it provides little information about new features and leaves important technical questions unanswered.

Pushing the Office Lever

Duet uses Office applications (mainly Outlook) as the front end to SAP's mySAP suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. The product makes mySAP data and processes, historically the domain of back-office specialists and managers, accessible to other workers in an organization, which helps reduce reliance on back-office workers to complete day-to-day tasks. For example, the first version of Duet includes a time-management application that lets workers use Outlook to enter their hours into mySAP.

The product serves several strategic goals for Microsoft and SAP. It helps Microsoft establish Office as a tool for business processes instead of being merely a desktop productivity tool. From SAP's standpoint, integrating mySAP with the nearly ubiquitous Office could help it gain a step on Oracle's business applications, which don't offer the same level of integration.

Duet also helps both companies extract more revenue from their large installed customer bases. Since shipping in June 2006, Duet has sold more than 400,000 licenses to some 250 customers at roughly US$125 per license.

Expanded Features, Partner Opportunities

The Sapphire 2007 announcement may reassure existing Duet customers that Microsoft and SAP will continue to refine and extend the product's features with future releases. In addition to an incremental release planned for the fourth quarter of 2007 (Duet 1.5, announced late in 2006, was initially scheduled for mid-2007), Microsoft and SAP will also ship a second and third version of the product. The announcement could inspire some holdouts to take a second look at Duet, particularly companies that opted out of the first version because of concerns that the product would not continue to get support from Microsoft and SAP.

Specifically, the companies announced that Duet 2.0 will ship late in 2008, about two and a half years after the initial launch of Duet. It will expand support for business processes such as sales and supply chain management, continuing Duet's move beyond pure employee self-service applications. Duet 2.0 will also integrate with SharePoint Server, Microsoft's platform for Web portals, content management, and business intelligence applications.

The announcement also indicated that a third version of Duet would ship some time after the next major release of Office; Microsoft has not set a timeline for that Office release, but it will probably not be available until 2009 or 2010. Of interest to partners, the announcement indicated that Duet 3.0 would supply tools to allow developers to customize and extend the product—for example, to allow it to access additional mySAP processes or data. To date, ISV partners have been shut out—neither Duet 1.0 nor Duet 1.5 provides programming interfaces or an SDK.

Sketchy Information

The Sapphire announcement gives prospective and existing Duet customers some assurance that Microsoft and SAP do not plan to eliminate the product, but it was light on details and raised more questions than it answered.

For example, the announcement provided very little tangible information on features of the Duet 2.0 and 3.0 releases. Although it hinted at better support for sales and purchasing processes, it did not describe in any detail how these new features will enhance the support for sales and purchasing provided by the current version of Duet. Additionally, the announcement made vague reference to Duet "embracing" SharePoint Server but offered little information about specific features SharePoint integration will deliver to Duet customers.

Furthermore, Microsoft and SAP have provided no information about the future of Duet's technology foundation. Current versions of Duet use Microsoft's Information Bridge Framework (IBF)—a development platform for building Word, Excel, and Outlook client solutions that access data and functions in Web services—to connect Office applications with mySAP. However, Microsoft has hinted that it plans to abandon the IBF, which would imply an eventual technology overhaul for Duet. Such an overhaul could complicate upgrades from early versions of Duet to later versions and slow the rate at which Microsoft and SAP add new Duet features.

Timing suggests that this overhaul may be in the works for Duet 3.0. Microsoft continues to work on a developer technology called LOBi (for line-of-business interoperability) that will likely replace the IBF and several other Microsoft technologies for integrating Microsoft applications and servers with business applications, such as mySAP. The company has indicated that LOBi will ship with the next major release of SharePoint Server, which like Duet 3.0 will coincide with the next version of Office. A technology overhaul in Duet 3.0 could also explain the decision to delay the release of Duet developer tools until that version ships.

Resources

More information about Duet is at www.duet.com.

The first version of Duet was described in "Duet Delivers Office Client for SAP" on page 27 of the July 2006 Update.

Duet version 1.5 is described in "New Roadmap for Duet" on page 14 of the Jan. 2007 Update.