In my previous posts I talked about how ERPs rely on excel and to what extent excel is needed in supporting an ERP System, when it comes to reporting and analysis etc.
Definitely this is something that the ERP Vendors have also been aware of and have identified that the best way to go about would be to integrate Excel with ERPs with regard to the business functions itself, to make work easier for the end users when it comes to using the ERP and excel together.
SAP has partnered up with MS and have developed the Duet Software for SAP, the Duet software enables seamless access to SAP business processes and data via Microsoft Office. SAP Terms that this development was done specially for those Information workers, yeah that’s right, its for those workers who work a lot more on excel analyzing and sorting information downloaded from the ERP itself. Initially this project initiated by SAP and MS Office was referred to as project “Mendocino” however later they changed it to “DUET”
Duet is sold and supported by both Microsoft and SAP. The product is available from SAP, as of June 28, 2006.
Looks like the Giants are beginning to address the fact that they cannot keep competing forever and have to tie their knots somewhere where there is no clear threat to either of them. Just for your information, there was a time when SAP and MS were considering merging, the idea came from MS and however this was later turned down due to reasons based on complexity !!!
However, I am sure a merger of this nature would have likely invited antitrust scrutiny. A merger of this nature would have outdone ORACLE, but ORACLE came back strongly to this saying that the market looked healthy and there was enough room for competition.
Coming back to the Excel integration, let’s look at ORACLE. They have also been ahead of the curve in this regard and have jointly with MS, come up with the technology via their Fusion Middleware that integrate business functions in ORACLE with MS Office.
Namely:
The technology and the products being, ORACLE Fusion Middleware and E-Business Suite,
the processes integrated being, Business Activity Monitoring, BPEL (Business process execution language) Manager and Business Intelligence (the ultimate module, I would say) and
MS office products being, MS Excel, Outlook and InfoPath.
ORACLE too have integrated with Office in such a way that 2 way information exchange takes place seamlessly and helps in increasing producvity of information workers specially.
I should say however that ORACLE has an impressive graphical display of performances and information in this regard.
Senior Director himself.
http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/tech/ias/Oracle_MSFT.html
So taking all the above into consideration and the demands of information workers, expect more integration with MS Office and ERPs in the future. I hope you found this post useful. Feel free to contact me on ssurenlk@msn.com if you have any queries.
Have a Nice Day !!
S.Suren
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