April 27, 2005

At SAP's Sapphire user conference, the company offered news of its Project Mendocino, which will let some users access SAP through Microsoft Office and Outlook.

Project Mendocino brings together two usually disparate worlds, those of enterprise applications and the desktop. Now that SAP and Microsoft are working together on this front, SAP users can go through Microsoft's ubiquitous productivity tools for such basic SAP tasks as travel and expense (T&E) management, budget monitoring, and time management.

As a recent AMR Research note points out, Mendocino has not yet hit more complex -- and valuable -- enterprise applications. AMR believes that "the real benefits will come" when users can access SAP customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and product lifecycle management (PLM) through Microsoft tools.

AMR has "one desktop for managing all customer interactions and data...collaborative forecasting and planning and trade promotion management [and] collaborative design" in mind as examples.

From another point of view, the alliance is of note because it will see SAP resell Office and Microsoft resell SAP's Business Process Platform.

Overall, AMR Research sees the partnership as "a brilliant move" designed to allow SAP "to achieve parity with a 1:1 correlation between Microsoft seats and SAP seats.

In terms of the ratio of seats to total head count, SAP estimates its penetration rate at about 25%. There's a lot of growth left to come without adding new customers."

Source: Line 56