SAP: Duet is “An Absolute Breakthrough”

Bill McDermott is excited about the direction business software vendor is headed. And for someone who has led the company’s U.S. operations to 14 consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth, he has every right to be.

In his keynote speech delivered Tuesday to more than 15,000 customers, partners and select employees at the Sapphire user event in Orlando, Fla., the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of SAP Americas gave a few reasons for his excitement: The company has delivered promising new products, such as CRM on-demand, SAP Analytics, and Duet, jointly developed with Microsoft, and it is breaking new ground with its services-based architecture.

McDermott referred to Duet as an “absolute breakthrough,” an innovative product that links workers at the Microsoft desktop to enterprise applications from SAP. He called the product a “major differentiator” for how companies could run their business.

The new frontier of software isn’t “hardwired solutions,” McDermott declared, but “component-based offerings,” giving customers greater agility to roll out new functions and features much faster.

“The industrialization of software is upon us,” he said. “We’re following the path of others before us, like the car industry. Cars became pervasive when parts became standardized.”

On that note, McDermott turned his attention to service-oriented architecture technology, or enterprise services architecture, as SAP calls it.

Easing users’ concerns of yet another new vendor platform, McDermott referred to the transition as “evolutionary and not disruptive,” a business process innovation that empowers businesses and allows them to “co-invest and co-innovate.”

Sapphire runs through Thursday.

-John Blau, IDG News Service

For related news coverage, read SAP Broadens Customer Base at Sapphire and SAP Stresses Master-Data Management.

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