Microsoft Office Meets ERP (Again)
When The VAR Guy heard about Microsoft’s latest ERP strategy, he got déjà vu all over again. The company says it plans to increasingly promote Microsoft Office as a front-end to its Dynamics ERP software. Hmmm. Microsoft has partnered with SAP on a similar strategy in the enterprise space.
As you may recall, Microsoft and SAP previously developed Duet, a Windows-oriented front end to SAP’s back-end software. You can find more about the Dynamics/Office strategy here.
More and more of my customers prefer a Web browser interface to access ERP from anywhere, rather than a heavy Office application. I sense that MSFT is about 2 years too late with its ERP strategy. The purchased Great Plains, and then the market shifted to hosted model with Salesforce.com. Does anyone really want client/server ERP with Office as a front end?
Not for as much as Microsoft and SAP would want to charge, No_to_Office. Microsoft should have started out with bolting Excel onto SAP, as SAP’s reporting and analysis functionality stinks and most third-party reporting tools cost an arm and a leg. But I think Microsoft thought all the financial types were using Excel anyway, so spending money on integrating Excel with SAP would have been a waste of capital. So they came up with Duet, which obviously went over like a lead balloon. From Microsoft’s perspective, as an entirely new product, Duet would have provided a new revenue stream and thus warranted the capital investment.