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.
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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.