Raikes Doles Out Some Duet Details

Jeff Raikes, Microsoft Business Division president, gave a little more detail on the joint SAP-Microsoft Duet roadmap.

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An interim 1.5 release will show up later this year to support "additional": Office-to-SAP linkage scenarios, he told reporters and analysts at the Sapphire 2007 show in Atlanta.

Version 2.0, probably due towards the end of next year "will have new scenarios and deeper scenarios in terms of what you have access to in SAP business processes. Things like project management," Raikes told press and analysts Tuesday in Atlanta. The 2.0 release "will also integrate SharePoint so people can use SharePoint as an extension to Duet scenarios," he said.

Yet another Duet release, 3.0, will follow the next major releases of SAP's business suite and Microsoft Office system, he said. In that iteration, SharePoint will become a foundation element and prerequisite for what we do in Duet 3.0 ," he noted.

Details on the new scenarios and functions will be shared closer to ship date, Raikes said.

Also at the show, SAP execs talked generally about the new A1S hosted ERP system due in a 2008 timeframe and sketched out their planned market segmentation

Business One, which will move to SAP's overall business process platform this year, will still targetscompanies with 5 to 100 employees while the planned A1S will target 50 to 500 employees, said Henning Kagermann, SAP's CEO. The existing All-in-One scales up to 2,000 to 3,000 people.

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"We could have named them A1, A2, A3, but we didn't, " Kagermann joked.

Generally, he said he saw services delivery as more suitable for customers don't need a ton of customization.

Kagermann said the ERP giant will pursue a dual strategy in terms of services delivery. It will continue to offer CRM and SRM functionality on demand.

"But in parallel we're putting energy and vision into a complete suite that will be available on demand first for the low-end of the marketand we will then see how much and how fast we can bring what we learn there to the higher end of the market. On demand will definitely be delivered differently depending on the market," he said.