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We are pleased to launch the Duet Enterprise Thought Leadership Series, a monthly installment featuring interviews with Duet Enterprise experts, partners, customers, and developers. Read to get to know Duet Enterprise experts, find out how Duet Enterprise can help you achieve your business goals, and learn tips and tricks of deploying Duet Enterprise successfully.

To start the Series, we asked Himanshu Pande, Duet Enterprise Solution Manager at SAP, for practical recommendations and best practices learnt from customer projects. Himanshu is currently involved in defining future releases of Duet Enterprise as well as enabling partners to develop solutions on top of Duet Enterprise.

1. Himanshu, you talk to customers on a daily basis and see first-hand the challenges that companies experience enabling employees to be more productive. From your experience, what are some of the business scenarios that can benefit from Duet Enterprise?
Generally speaking, what we are seeing is a trend towards workflow approvals scenarios such as purchase requisition approvals and invoice approvals. Another aspect that is getting traction is around time recorded requests. There is also quite a lot of interest around reporting and CRM scenarios. We took these trends in consideration while working on Feature Pack 1 which is currently in ramp-up. With the release of Feature Pack 1, customers will be able to expand their workflow approvals to include, for example, leave requests, and take advantage of the calendar template that will be provided.
2. How long does a typical implementation take?
End to end, it can take approximately eight weeks. Two weeks to set-up (make sure that the client has the right version of the systems – one week on the SAP side and one week on the Microsoft side). Development time in a simple scenario (simple coding and customization) could take up to three weeks. And two to three weeks of testing. It could take a total of six to eight weeks.
3. What are the skills needed to implement Duet Enterprise?
A lot of our potential customers are looking at doing the implementations in-house. The target audience for Duet Enterprise is customers who have existing SAP and Microsoft SharePoint so if they already have these two technologies in-house, they already have the skills. Duet Enterprise may be a new product, but it is not a new technology.
4. For SAP customers who also have Microsoft technologies within the company, it seems logical that they should bring these two worlds together and leverage on their existing IT investments. Is that the case?
Duet Enterprise helps leverage the fact that most customers have large investments in SAP and Microsoft. But what happens is that typically these worlds work in silos. It has been a long wish from CIOs to bridge these two worlds. So with Duet Enterprise, companies get the functionality available in SharePoint and Office on the collaboration and ad-hoc workflow pieces including the ability to do team work together, plus the SAP processes and data that you can make available through SharePoint. The real value is that you can use SAP and your business system, pull out information, put in on SharePoint and work more effectively.
5. Do companies need to have a specific version of SAP or Microsoft systems to be able to implement Duet Enterprise? Are there additional software requirements when implementing this solution?
There are some technology requirements: on the SAP side, you need to be at least on NetWeaver 7.02; on the Microsoft side, you need to be in SharePoint 2010. If you are going for scenarios that will be using Office, you need Office 2010. On the actual package side, you can connect to all SAP versions (all the way back to 4.6c).
6. What are the risks involved when using Duet Enterprise to connect SAP and Microsoft?
The biggest risk is the fact that most customers’ SAP and Microsoft worlds don't interact. In order to operate fully and get the most benefits, you need organizations to work together so that they can have data coming from SAP and share it in Microsoft. Usually, people in the ABAP side [SAP] don't know what is happening in the .NET side [Microsoft]. We need to evangelize change management - there is a way to bring these two technologies together. There are clear benefits in the way of new business scenarios that are very inexpensive.
7. What about end users? Do they need any specialized training? How does it affect their productivity?
When we started working on this product, the idea was zero training. Since we are targeting customers that are Microsoft users, they are familiar with its UIs [User Interfaces]. So, when designing the scenarios and UIs, Microsoft and SAP made sure to use user paradigms to a very large extend and avoid anything that was away from the Microsoft look and feel. The main objective is to expose data from SAP in a way that is familiar to users so they don't need to be trained.
People are used to working with multiple back-end systems. They get information from ERP, CRM, etc. The idea behind Duet Enterprise is that it doesn’t matter where the data is coming from; users get to work on one UI which saves them time. It also allows them to focus on the process and not the system.
8. What are some of the best practices learnt from customer implementations?
The biggest challenge is to work on the mindset of the IT organizations - SAP and Microsoft – as these two organizations can come together and create meaningful business processes. To succeed, you need to make sure that you have a champion that understands what Duet Enterprise is and who can articulate what it does and the benefits to the SAP and Microsoft worlds. You need someone that can clearly define on both sides how things come together.
In addition, you need to clearly identify the scenarios that bring value to the business and make sense for Duet Enterprise. There is no point in running all your business scenarios on this solution. There are scenarios that are better with SAP GUI like those that are very heavy on transactions. So, based on your needs, you need to determine what processes make sense to expose with Duet Enterprise and what are the scenarios that provide more value.
From the technology stand point, you need people that know what makes sense. You need people that have training in terms of development.
9. How do you envision Duet Enterprise in the future? What’s the impact of current trends such as mobility and cloud?
Like any other product, Duet Enterprise is going through an evolution and growth path. From an evolutionary perspective, based on feedback from customers, we know how we need to evolve (organic growth). But we are also looking at revolutionary ideas based on customers’ requests in terms of feature functions that we feel will take the value proposition of Duet Enterprise to a new level. Overall, we are trying to create a balance between evolution and revolution. An example of evolution is social media. In the next release, we are planning to leverage some of the capabilities in terms of cloud and mobility. The next version of Office is planning to include some of these trends and Duet Enterprise will leverage on that. In terms of revolutionary growth, stay tuned!
10. Speaking of mobility... What kind of phone do you have? What’s your favorite app?
I have an iPhone. There is an app that I use frequently called Around Me. It provides information about businesses around your location. It finds their locations and allows you to map them. They do a good job as I have used it in new areas and I've found information about new businesses. They add new information very quickly.
At home, my daughter is the one that uses apps. It’s great to see that not only businesses and adults use them but toddlers can use them too. She is hooked on Angry Birds, I guess it’s no longer a grown up game...
Thank you, Himanshu. For our readers who will be going to SAP TechEd Las Vegas, stop by session CD110 - In-Depth Overview of Duet Enterprise and Feature Pack I - to meet Himanshu in person and find out more about Duet Enterprise. For information about other session presentations related to Duet Enterprise during the conference, click here.