Customers are responding well to the Duet concept of extending SAP to the desktop and improving end user productivity on the back of SAP and Microsoft technology but some have reservations about taking on Duet, according to AMR Research Inc.
Concerns relate to the need to ugrade to mySAP ERP 2004, hidden costs, and issues arsing where organizations were already using IBM Lotus Notes for groupware processes.
The IT requirements are potentially onerous. As well as needing a minimum of SAP ERP 2004, organizations also need to be running NetWeaver, Microsoft Exchange Server and Windows Server 2003, plus Microsoft Office 2003 Professional. Some Duet scenarios also demand additional SAP software such as Employee Self Service, mySAP CRM 4.0 and mySAP SRM 5.0, and SAP NetWeaver BW 3.5.
AMR estimated that only 29% of the SAP customers it surveyed within the retail and manufacturing sectors had the prerequisite technology in place. Some customers were nervous about the extra investment they would have to make to deploy Duet applications if SAP pulled support in the future if it failed to take off.
Duet is a core component of SAP’s growth strategy and one of the new technologies the company is relying on to expand its addressable market and triple its customer base by 2010, suggesting it is unlikely to drop the product. However, even though SAP customers see the value in Duet only 11% of respondents said they would upgrade for the sake of Duet. Its success relies on take-up of NetWeaver and mySAP ERP 2004.
Meanwhile SAP is preparing the second wave of scenarios, with Value Pack 1 which will cover recruitment management, travel management and analytics scheduled for the third quarter 2006. Value Pack 2 is due in the fourth quarter providing sales management and purchase management scenarios, plus Microsoft Office 2007 support. Other plans include the provision of a development environment for custom scenarios that could be used by customers and ISV’s.
In separate news, Staffordshire County Council said it was planning to go live with Duet early next year as the final part of a five-year plan to consolidate on the SAP environment. It is one of the first UK organizations to commit to Duet.
At the end of July the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission in the US announced that it had started rolling out a $36.5m SAP implementation which will include Duet. Although Duet of itself is not considered sufficient reason to upgrade, where customers are upgrading for operational or strategic reasons, there are indications that it is seen as a natural addition.
