SAP

SAP, Microsoft to Link Business Apps in Joint Product

By Dennis Callaghan April 26, 2005

SAP and Microsoft will team up for a joint software offering that brings together SAP's business applications and Microsoft's Office desktop productivity applications, the two companies announced Tuesday. The software, which will be a separate product license, is being jointly developed under the code name "Mendocino." An early beta of the joint product is expected by the fourth quarter of this year, the two companies said. Mendocino will link SAP process functionality such as time management, budget monitoring, organizational management, and travel and expense management directly into Microsoft Office applications such as Excel, Outlook and Word. It's the first joint product-development effort by SAP AG and Microsoft Corp., and it will give users the familiarity of Microsoft Office as they access SAP's business processes and information through SAP-specific "smart panels" in Office applications. The idea is to extend SAP business applications to more users in an organization through the Office apps with which they are more familiar, company officials said. Mendocino will be a composite application, built on top of SAP's forthcoming business process platform, expected next year. SAP and Microsoft each will resell the complete solution, meaning SAP will resell Microsoft Office and Microsoft will resell licenses to SAP's business process platform, officials said. "For the first time, Microsoft and SAP are designing, developing, selling and supporting one joint product," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said in an exclusive interview with eWEEK. Kagermann said Mendocino goes beyond existing integrations between business application software and Office. Virtually every business-application software developer offers some level of integration with Office apps today. "Everybody can link into something, but they don't offer a joint product that supports both products," said Kagermann, at SAP's Sapphire '05 international customer conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. "We'll bring innovation and design across both products, and users' productivity can be increased." The product that emerges from Mendocino will be a separate license, though the terms have not been determined, Kagermann said. In other news at Sapphire '05, SAP unveiled a preview of its ESA (Enterprise Services Architecture) that includes more than 500 live enterprise services that have been developed and deployed on the latest version of MySAP ERP. This ESA preview system will be available for partners, developers and customers to contribute to the definition and development of new business processes, SAP officials said.