Microsoft SharePoint is the platform for portal-based collaboration and document management/enterprise content management (ECM). The product also works tightly with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Unified Communications (UC), both Microsoft technologies that will be described in detail later on. This integration provides great visibility for workflows related to documents and document libraries, and improving collaboration through the “presence” and “click to communicate” features.

Today, SharePoint is the universal portal technology for the Dynamics portfolio; for example, in Dynamics AX 2009, the AX Enterprise Portal (formerly Axapta Enterprise Portal) is now based on SharePoint. The portal was devised from the standard SharePoint design experience, whereby a gallery of Dynamics AX Web parts is now available, making it very simple to bring to the surface Dynamics AX data (with the inherent AX security model enforced) on SharePoint portal pages.

In addition to Web parts, other strategies for SharePoint integration are its Business Data Catalog (BDC) Web Services feature (currently used within Microsoft Dynamics GP [evaluate this product] and Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product]), and data binding (within Dynamics AX). It is likely that BDC services will grow further in importance, and we should expect a broad Microsoft Dynamics consistency around this feature.

To expand further on the use of the Microsoft SQL Server database that was discussed at the end of Part 1, all Microsoft Dynamics reporting capabilities will in the future come natively (which also means without new license fees) through SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and associated tools. This was first developed within Microsoft Dynamics GP 9 and Microsoft Dynamics AX [evaluate this product], and will be adopted more broadly across other Dynamics products. In the Microsoft Dynamics AX 4 release, there was the capability of creating ad hoc reports, whereas most recently released Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 also uses SSRS for all production reports.

Innovation is now surfacing as a result of integration between the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) development platform and SQL Server. Namely, there is now the ability to launch Precision Report Designer and maintain the Dynamics AX semantic models in VS.NET and to pass the data in a closed-loop manner to and from Dynamic AX logic models. These models can in turn look into the Dynamics AX database (SQL Server) via database secure views. The future development will make these currently static models dynamic for report-customization purposes.

Along similar lines will be the use of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), whereby all Dynamics role centers within the user experience (UX) project (mentioned in Part 1) will feature embedded contextual business intelligence (BI). Currently, Dynamics AX 2009 has the cube generation capability, whereby analytics perspectives have been added to the business logic model, and which can generate Data Source Views (DSV’s) and Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) cubes. The future research and development (R&D) forays will likely enable the round-trip (between VS.NET and SQL Server) advanced features that will require similar features to the abovementioned reporting tools.

As a little caveat, these native reporting and analytics features will not be automatically available to the users of the proprietary Microsoft Dynamics NAV C/Side database (about half of the install base) and Dynamics AX Oracle instances. For Dynamics NAV customers using the older C/Side database, most of them upgrade to SQL Server when they move to a new NAV version anyway, while Dynamics AX users on Oracle can access the new reporting and analytics features by adding SSRS and SSAS to their deployment. Still, Microsoft will, for the foreseeable future, honor the ongoing support for these databases alongside its SQL Server.

Still, although WPF provides a visually appealing, familiar and intuitive UI, it comes with some trade-offs, specifically in memory utilization (being hardware intensive), the need to be hooked to the network, and a much greater dependency on Microsoft software. For instance, IFS doesn’t use WPF today for IFS Applications’ UI simply because of hardware needs: running WPF requires quite a hefty PC in terms of memory, and preferably the (possibly still unstable) Windows Vista platform.

We are talking here about IFS’ upcoming next-generation UI, which had for some time been called Aurora, but is now called IFS Enterprise Explorer (IEE). Namely, to prevent any confusion about Aurora being a separate product from IFS Applications, IFS has recently clarified its naming conventions.

Aurora is now a development project that will yield several enhancements to IFS Applications, all with a focus on ease-of-use and user productivity. The first deliverable as part of the Aurora project is IEE, the new graphical user interface (GUI) for IFS Applications. It is important to note that after IEE is released, the Aurora project will continue, yielding future enhancements.

In any case, IEE is interesting, to say the least, for leveraging Microsoft UI technology to create a look (albeit not yet the multi-touch touch screen, handgestures, etc. feel) of Apple iPhone (on top of Oracle database and Java-based application servers on the back end: some mix of technologies from adversaries, indeed). It is becoming quite obvious that the iPod and iPhone generation is our future workforce, who require well designed tools that they “love” to interact with. At the same time, they accept no excuses for “Why can’t I…?” questions, such as, for instance, “Why can’t I search in the enterprise application in the same way that I search on Google?”

At the end of the day, the design goal is to achieve more with fewer staff members, who thus have broader responsibilities, are able to handle the unexpected, collaborate with colleagues, and be more productive. In other words, the market drivers are the new and engaging design and user productivity. Consumer information technology (IT) and the web are leading the way, and are also becoming quite important for business applications.

To that end, prior to the IEE undertaking, IFS developed a pervasive enterprise search engine that attempts to think the way people think (e.g., “I need that fault report about the fire alarm not working”), and not the way enterprise systems think (i.e., “I want go into the preventive maintenance module where, in the service request folder, I will start the fault report screen, in which I shall then make a query on the description field containing any words followed by the words ‘fire alarm’ followed by any other words again”).

However, what has somewhat intrigued me is Microsoft’s not-so-vocal touting and promoting of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), although it is an intrinsic part of the .NET Framework. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the tool has not yet been used within the Dynamics set in earnest, although Lawson Software and Verticent would be the two independent software vendors (ISV) that I am aware of deploying it.

Both vendors tout WPF’s rich UIs that support virtually infinite customizations and business process compositions using Microsoft applications. Other Microsoft-centric ISVs either support only a limited number of specific and prescriptive business scenarios, or use a combination of technology products (for example, Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBAs), Visual Studio.NET, and proprietary interfaces and UI tools) to come up with similar custom scenarios. Again, Microsoft currently uses WPF very selectively in Dynamics UIs, for example, in the Dynamics AX graphical view of the organization structure of the business.

With its Smart Office offering, Lawson is not the first to leverage Microsoft Office to deliver not only manager and employee self-service, but much more as well. In fact, I could think of the joint SAP and Microsoft Duet product, Epicor Productivity Pyramid, QAD .NET UI, SYSPRO Office Integration [SOI]), IFS Business Analytics, and so on.

However, by leveraging WPF, Lawson embeds manager and employee self-service functionality more directly into Microsoft Outlook than Duet (which is more of an add-on launched from Outlook as an integrated pane) and most other vendors’ OBA solutions. Fore more details on Lawson Smart Office, see my earlier blog post on the vendor’s CUE 2008 conference and the Gartner Dataquest Insight report by Bob Anderson entitled “Lawson Raises the Bar With Differentiating ERP User Interface.”

Curiously, Lawson has deployed another non-mainstream Microsoft technology, Microsoft Office Groove. It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration platform, providing an outstanding base for collaboration (document exchange) scenarios that involve teams with sometimes disconnected participants. Microsoft claims that future product releases will improve the alignment for collaboration between Groove and SharePoint.

Lawson’s technology decision was likely owing to Groove’s concept of “shared workspaces” and Lawson’s view that individuals live in a “space” where they do most of their work. For example, a manager really “lives in” Microsoft Outlook, and should be able to do all his/her work from there. An accountant lives in Microsoft Excel and should be able to work from there. A mobile technician lives in the cell phone/personal data assistant (PDA) metaphor, where the Apple iPhone or Palm Treo similarity of UI can come in handy.

Coming back to the second issue from the beginning of this blog series, i.e., Microsoft Business Division’s (MBD) Profit & Loss (P&L) statement, at the Convergence 2008 user conference, the giant stated the following stats for Microsoft Dynamics:

* A 26 percent revenue growth in Q2 2008;
* Nearly 300,000 customers worldwide;
* Nearly 10,000 business partners worldwide;
* About 1,700 Dynamics solutions in Solution Finder; and
* Over 14,000 customers and over 625,000 users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Now, some nitpickers might say that Microsoft Dynamics is not a profit generator for Microsoft, if not even bleeding money due to all the ongoing product investment. Well, guess what, Microsoft is certainly not in dire need of cash to squeeze it out of Dynamics’ operations.

As some of you might know, now that Dynamics is part of MBD, which contains Microsoft Office, Dynamics, Exchange, Office Live and Unified Communications, the parent company doesn’t report the Dynamics business separately any longer in terms of revenue and operating income. However, Microsoft still discloses Dynamics customer billings figures every quarter, and here are the three data points it has publicly disclosed:

1. In fiscal 2006, the last time Dynamics was an external P&L entity, it achieved profitability in Q4, and was profitable for the full year;
2. In fiscal 2007, Dynamics crossed an important internal milestone of becoming an over US$ 1 billion business; and
3. For fiscal 2007 and 2008, Dynamics has reported a 21 percent growth in billings in each of those years.

But the thing that represents Dynamics’ “extra” contribution is the sale of all those Microsoft platform components to all of the customers of Dynamics. That is to say that Dynamics creates a “pull” for other Microsoft technologies.

For IEE IFS uses Microsoft ClickOnce, which is a technology designed to perform web-based deployment of rich applications. Basically the authorized user clicks on a link and the application loads straight from the web server without needing to be installed and distributed via CDs (like traditional client/server applications). It works similar to the counterpart Java Web Start or Adobe Flash technologies.

ClickOnce can be used for all Microsoft .NET UI application styles including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Silverlight. Basically, it is the deployment technology for Windows applications. IFS decided not to use WPF as the technology for building UI initially but plans to do so for its next major update due in a couple of years, when it also expects the availability of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, which the vendor believes will serve its needs well. It is also currently possible to mix WPF and Windows Forms in the same application, since the interoperability apparently works very well.

In any case, the current set of tools used by IFS has helped the ergonomic design and easy navigational technologies, such as: adaptable links panel, contextual breadcrumb navigation, and rich media. Adaptable links panel is a panel at the screen that shows all places “where a user can go from here.” For example, when viewing a customer order the Link panel will show links to customer information, price agreement, service level agreement (SLA) contract, and other “related” information (see figure below).

Addressing the plethora of disconnected applications is the first step a small or mid-sized company can take to gain better control of its business operations and increase the efficiency of those operations. A single integrated suite of software - often referred to as an ERP or enterprise resource planning solution - provides significant advantages to the business, accommodating the breadth of the company's business processes, while providing the flexibility for even small companies to tailor the suites to meet their specific business needs.

Why do I care if my applications are integrated?

Today's technology solutions for the middle market and smaller businesses have distinct advantages over their predecessors - both the large ERP products that were installed in very big company and the standalone applications that were traditionally installed in the SMB. New advances in technology bring mid-sized companies the benefits of a single business management suite without the cost, complexity, and rigidity of traditional software applications.

So let's look at these benefits. What does an integrated suite of business applications allow your business to achieve that a collection of stand-alone applications cannot?

1. Functionality. Access to all the core functionality required to run the business over time - at an affordable price point.
2. Scalability. Integrated suite solutions are designed to grow with your company. Stand-alone applications generally "top out" without transition paths to other solutions, leaving you to start over from scratch with a new and different application. An integrated suite provided as "Software-as-a- Service" (i.e., software hosted online) will allow seamless growth. You can add more users, more modules, increase your database size, and increase your volume of transactions as your business grows without business disruption.
3. Consistent data management. Stand-alone applications - sometimes referred to as "silos" - can't easily talk to one another. Thus, small and middle-market companies spend a great deal of time doing the same task reiteratively - entering the same data in different programs. There are some identifiable problems with this:

It is a waste of time to reenter data over again.

It is very likely to be entered incorrectly.

It may look different in different programs (Why do I have two companies in my vendor list - one is International Business Machines and one is IBM? Why do I have two versions of the same customer - Robert Smith and Bob Smith - with the same address?)

Data that results from very different disconnected applications is inconsistent, so attempts to analyze it yields the proverbial "apples and oranges" - a decision-support fruit salad.

Data isn't readily accessible - data in an integrated system can be accessed without effort spent trying to tie or consolidate the data together.

Lack of visibility into business information that crosses either departments or standalone applications.

Timely access to information. Because a SaaS system is "real-time" you get the information you want at your fingertips immediately.

1. Vendor management. Face it, managing a plethora of vendors with multiple 800 numbers for customer service is not easy. An integrated suite gives you one solution supplier to work with.
2. Reliable service and support. The ability to access affordable service and support is critical. It is easier to support an integrated ERP environment than a hodgepodge of different applications.
3. Clarity. With an integrated business management suite, there is a "single version of the truth" that only needs to be entered once to be propagated to all parts of the business that need it. All business processes, all employees who touch the application, and all the executives who make decisions for the company see the same version of reality, in real time, all the time.
4. Business process customization and automation. Only with an integrated business management suite can SMBs actually tailor the entire business processes that underpin how they conduct their business. Because workflow underlies the entire suite and not just fragmented parts of it, SMBs for the first time have tools to customize the solutions to work exactly how their businesses work - rather than having an application that dictates how the business has to be run.
5. Long term cost of ownership when provided as SaaS. When an integrated suite is offered as Software-as-a-Service - allowing businesses to subscribe to a service rather than purchase, install, and maintain an in-house software solution - companies can better forecast and manage their costs, and eliminate high internal IT support costs. Web-based delivery of business solutions proves the most economical in the long run as your business needs grow and change2. Research shows that SaaS deployments are 50% to 90% faster with a total cost of ownership (TCO) five to ten times less expensive than traditional software.3 Cost of ownership can be complex - as it includes far more than just the savings gleaned in original purchase and implementation. It also includes:

The time, expense and skill required to integrate the multiple applications which has to occur each time an application in the mix is upgraded or replaced

The cost of potential disruption or downtime when the multiple products are upgraded or new revisions or releases are installed

Time and dollars spent upgrading software and ensuring integrated systems work properly together after each upgrade

The very positive effects of increased productivity: faster order processing, rapid access to critical data by employees, increased ability to address customer issues immediately; instant data for upsell/reselling, returns management, as only a few of the many examples.

The even more positive effects of timely, accurate billing with compliance to all revenue recognition requirements

Small and middle-market companies are the lifeblood of the economy - in all regions of the world. But many of these companies today feel the need for a transfusion - the operational boost that can move them to a customer-focused business with the ability to grow even larger. These small and mid-sized businesses (called SMBs) have many of the same business requirements as large corporations; they may be smaller or employ fewer people, but they can have equally complex business processes.

Big businesses moved from home-grown legacy systems to a plethora of stand-alone applications (sometimes referred to in the past as "best of breed"), but by the end of the 1990's these big guys had consolidated on running the majority of their core business on one integrated platform, such as SAP's R/3, PeopleSoft, or Oracle applications. These integrated business applications proved invaluable in improved productivity and better business management, but at the time, they were also expensive, complex, difficult to implement, manage and support, with protracted deployments (sometimes years) that delayed a recognizable return on investment. For these reasons, small and mid-sized businesses avoided these large ERP suites like the proverbial plague; at the time, they were just too risky for a small business to undertake. Despite repeated efforts from the big ERP vendors to capture the mid-market businesses, the SMBs simply weren't biting.

Unlike the Fortune 1000, today's SMBs are more likely to have a hodge-podge of software products in use in their business. These applications typically share common characteristics: the financial packages, usually the first procured, run on a standalone PC, and are the first to cause problems, as they cannot accommodate growth in transactions, cannot scale to accommodate more users, and have severe database limitations. The second software package a small business buys is usually tied to the nature of the business itself - an application suitable to the vertical industry in which the business plays. And these two applications don't "talk" to each other. Additional applications - inventory or warehouse management, customer relationship management (CRM), T&E management, HR, etc., may be added - leaving the small business with a disconnected slew of applications - and what's worse - the problems of manually entering and re-entering data across these multiple products. The ramifications include lost productivity in work hours spent re-entering data manually and attempting to consolidate data from the disparate systems; extremely high error rates, as manually entered data is highly prone to mistakes; lack of visibility to the information necessary to make decisions; and outgrown applications that cannot scale to allow the business to grow. The SMB is trapped by the limits of the very technology that was intended to help the company grow and thrive.

And unlike large companies, small and mid-sized businesses face the realities of smaller budgets, fewer IT resources, and zero tolerance for risk. They cannot withstand the long implementation timeframes or the cost of the ERP solutions that are the mainstay of large corporations.

However, hardly anyone's heart should be crying for Microsoft. As the old adage says, "still water runs deep" , and Microsoft has at least used the Duet and Snap experience to bide time to come up with an even more encompassing solution. Before that, the giant had to conduct some serious soul-searching, such as whether to conclude "Project Green", which sought synergy across its ERP product lines.. Considering this hindsight, it is no longer that important to know whether Microsoft merely toyed with the product convergence idea or if it was the wishful thinking of the news-hungry press and eager analysts (some of which are now gloating about the idea's abandonment). Most likely, the temptation was there (who, after all, wouldn't be tempted to deal with only one product line, as opposed to four?), but a deeper analysis of acquired products has likely caused Microsoft to conclude that each product line has some distinctive technical and functional aspects. This, in conjunction with the partner ecosystem, would make doing anything injudiciously and precipitously (such as imposing unfamiliar tools and technologies) result in the alienation of the existing customers and partners.
But, Microsoft certainly did not panic, and has meanwhile rather spent time on figuring out how it can parlay its desktop supremacy (with an estimated 400 million Office users worldwide) into attracting enterprise applications users, and possibly changing some enterprise applications paradigms. Microsoft operating systems and desktop products have traditionally defined the user experience for most types of applications (with some challenges coming from the simplicity and intuitiveness of Web browser and portals). But, from the vendor's perspective, there is much more to Office integration than the several simple scenarios enabled by Duet and Snap. As Office evolves into a system that supports deeper and contextual business intelligence (BI), workflow, search, document management, and enhanced collaboration through products like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft has come up with a composite architecture that quite exceeds the one of Duet. It builds on the long-espoused idea of providing users with more integrated and contextual working environment (see What Do Users Want and Need? ). Perhaps the best example is the successful Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 product that features native Outlook UI and its accompanying, instantly familiar experience. Indeed, anyone who wants to see what comprehensive integration between a business management application and Office looks like, should check out the user experience of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, where the entire application "lives inside" of Microsoft Outlook. For more information, see War Looms in the On-demand CRM Market (and Beyond)—But Will You Profit from It?.

This would be the best embodiment of Microsoft's vision of connecting people across a company with the business processes and information they need to be successful within the context of the productivity tools they use every day. The idea is now is to determine how to extend similar capabilities and the same (or at least a similar) "look-and-feel" across all the ERP product lines. There is at least some virtual convergence of diverse product lines (if not necessarily the convergence at the server side). To that end, Microsoft touts "simplification" and "minimalism" as the guiding principles of evolving its applications and making them modern, in terms of user experience, runtime infrastructure, and design time tools. On the user experience side, the vendor has tailored the user experience to roles (thereby trying to reduce the user experience footprint per-role, as will be described later on). On the runtime infrastructure side, it has added several Microsoft technologies, ranging from reporting via analysis to portal capabilities. By doing so, the Microsoft Dynamics team has been able to get rid of a bunch of arcane code in its existing runtime environments that had duplicative middleware, since all Dynamics ERP products' portal presentation layers are now native in SharePoint, with reporting being in native Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The idea behind this was not just a simple case of substitution, but actually a reduction in code or abstractions that Microsoft had to maintain, and also the democratization of access to the data and business logic.

When it comes to design time, Microsoft Dynamics developers have been religious about keeping the development metadata driven. This was to mitigate the traditional difficulties within competitive development environments when it comes to enabling the extensibility of their products (e.g., adding entities, adding a couple of fields, relating these relationships, adding some form, writing some logic, exposing the underlying business logic as a Web service, creating a Really Simple Syndication [RSS] feed out of it, etc). Conversely, Microsoft touts its metadata driven modeling tools as a key to how to achieve and maintain simplicity (which is the key driver for the partners' productivity too) for the most complex of customization tasks, while still adding new runtime capability like workflows, process, role-tailored user experience, etc.
Such new easily deployed and reasonably priced packages are aimed at helping customers improve the situation they face today. On average 85 percent of employees do not have direct access to critical information, such as data on customers, costs, orders, and schedules, contained in their ERP application. Microsoft argues that many users want to work exclusively in one Office environment or the other, rather than in pesky proprietary ERP screens. To that end, in March 2007, during the Microsoft Convergence 2007 user conference, Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of a new offering that should help customers further extend the power, insights, and process control of their Microsoft Dynamics ERP applications to most of their employees via familiar business productivity tools in the Microsoft Office system. The new Office-based client is intended to make the ERP capabilities available to a vast majority of employees, in comparison to customarily only extending this to those employees who have purchased ERP seats.

This new package, was somewhat awkwardly named (compared to Duet) as Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server (MOSS), and contains a collection of up to 12 self-service applications that are built into the Microsoft Office release and SharePoint products and technologies. It also has a license for the recently released Office SharePoint Server 2007. These applications, such as Time and Attendance for Microsoft Dynamics GP, Project Time and Expense for Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics Snap Business Data Lookup for Microsoft Dynamics AX, and FRx WebPort and DrillDown Viewer, are expected to simplify access to business information and help connect employees more closely with their company's business processes. Also included in this new offering are licensing rights for customers or industry partners to build their own Office Business Applications (OBA), a new category of programs where Microsoft Office becomes the front-end for accessing the back-end ERP functionality of Microsoft Dynamics. For more information, see Microsoft's Underlying Platform Parts for Enterprise Applications: Somewhat Explained.

This new package has been priced to facilitate companywide deployment, as the price for Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services is $195 (USD) per user and Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server is $395 (USD) per user. Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office is available to Microsoft Dynamics Business Ready Licensing Advanced Management customers for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 and Microsoft Dynamics SL 7.

The Web services calls from the Office Add-On are relayed into the SAP environment, which also occurs within the Duet Extensions through the service bundling component. The engine on the client loads assemblies and metadata from the cache and interprets the metadata descriptions of applications to execute service calls, execute business logic, and construct and display the UI screen based on metadata, and interact with host software. The runtime engine uses an Outlook services library (using the standard programming features of Outlook) to integrate the following features and services:

* Action pane. The Duet action pane will mimic the behavior of the Office programmable task pane.
* Toolbar buttons. Custom buttons can be added to the application-level toolbar, and these buttons will trigger the execution of metadata-based actions.
* Context menu items. Custom context menu items can be added to folder and item context menus to trigger the execution of metadata-based actions.
* Outlook events. Selected standard Outlook events and behaviors are extended to automatically activate metadata-defined actions.
* Custom calendar views. Outlook tabbed forms and action panes are defined via metadata.
* Contact management. Additional tabs are added to contact objects for server-maintained data.

As for the security issues, the challenge Duet faces with authentication is that authentication needs to be separated from the authentication within the system. For authentication within the system, Duet reuses the authentication of the local user in the Microsoft Windows environment. This is generally implemented using Windows NT LAN (Local Area Network) Manager or Microsoft Active Directory, which most users are familiar with. Within Duet, SAP security experts have developed a module that is able to take the user token from the Windows environment and map it to the proper SAP user. In doing so, Duet is able to issue a single sign-on ticket enabling the client to communicate in a with the web services on the SAP side in a secure manner.

Once authentication is secured, standard SAP guidelines and principles take effect and the access is granted based on authorization profiles associated with the user in the underlying SAP system. For example, each profile is associated with a only a few of the cost centers that exist in the underlying system. A user can have access only to his or her own personal information based on service scenarios, while a manager is granted access only to his or her organizational unit within the entire system, and so on.
The Recent Duet Uptake

In any case, Duet's highly involved collaborative architecture that has shown the major "pains and gains" of SOA. (For more information, see SOA from a Management Perspective ). And it has resulted in a commercial product that is unequivocally priced (approximately, $125 [USD] per user, though this price does not include Microsoft Office and SAP licenses, but only for Duet functionality), that is sold and supported under no uncertain terms. With the most recent Duet 1.5 release, some drawbacks of Duet 1.0 have also been addressed, such as the number of supported languages, which has been extended to 16: Simplified Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Norwegian, and Traditional Chinese. These are in addition to English, German, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese in Duet 1.0. A few more scenarios were added too (e.g., recruitment management, travel management, purchasing management, workflow approvals and reports and analytics), some of which run within a Excel UI screen too (as opposed to only within Outlook in the Duet 1.0 scenarios). One should imagine the inclusion of data from other back-end systems beside those of SAP, down the track.

In fact, the success of over 400,000 sold Duet licenses within 18 months has "shocked and awed" many competitors. The responses were numerous, as competitors began to trot out their own, comparable products. IBM cited its Project Harmony that features the integration of Lotus Notes and IBM Workplace (formerly Lotus Workplace) to SAP (and to many more SAP product releases than Duet), Google touted its no-brainer on-demand Google Enterprise applications, many other vendors said that they also have the Office-based (or Office-like) interface. Others flouted their Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming. Adobe/Macromedia Flex or simply an Internet browser also flagged their products with their familiar and intuitive interfaces (ironically, MSN Hotmail was one of the best deployments of AJAX).

In a particularly peculiar position was Microsoft, which certainly could not complain about royalties from 400,000 deployments (or at least acknowledgements) of Office, Exchange or Windows Server. However, the Microsoft Dynamics business applications group and the accompanying partner ecosystem probably didn't share the same enthusiasm, by any respect. To appease these constituencies, Microsoft released Microsoft Dynamics Snap applications n mid-2006. Microsoft Dynamics Snap, which, beside UI familiarity and simplicity for users, also provided in-context business data lookup in Microsoft Office programs. At the time, Microsoft pointed out that Dynamics Snap was a "shared source" initiative, because the vendor wanted to encourage its partners to build and customize these solutions for their customers, either for specific roles and verticals or to contribute in helping Microsoft build more solutions that enhance productivity and empower information workers. Microsoft emphasized its approach of doing this in a community environment, by distributing the Snap programs under a shared source license to enable people from other companies to modify and extend the programs at no charge. Since then, there have been reported over 18,000 downloads of Snap along with nearly 1,500 individual developers and companies that have joined the Dynamics shared source community. Although this continues to be a great way for Microsoft to understand the dynamics of a Web 2.0-style community (social networks) environment as it applies to business management software, there has been confusion about licensing to customers and what other products customer need to make use of the MS Dynamics Snap.
Even the developers from SAP Labs often express their love for the idea of mash-ups, which, according to Webopedia, is a term derived from the hip-hop music practice of mixing songs together. Mash-ups refer to a new breed of Web-based applications created (unfortunately) by hackers and programmers (typically on a volunteer basis) to mix at least two different services from disparate, and even competing, Web sites. A mash-up, for example, could overlay traffic data from one source on the Internet over maps from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, or any content provider. Creating a mash-up from multiple sources into one dynamic entity is considered by many to represent the promise of the Web service standard and of on-demand computing (see SaaS-ing the Manufacturing Opportunity ). However, this business model has yet to create viable intellectual property and revenue streams for participants (given the dynamic nature of new product releases and versions), and especially in terms of a structured support and maintenance, which seems to be well spelled out in case of Duet.

The metadata repository stores metadata, authorizes access, and enforces the consistency of stored data, whereby the metadata storage component is a relational database built on top of Microsoft SQL Express 2005. This metadata describes objects that are exposed within Microsoft Office and their related UIs and associated actions, and is being pulled by the client, based on the user and his or her role(s) within the organization. The Microsoft Exchange handle, on the other had provides an application-friendly and user-friendly view of messages in Microsoft Exchange. It addresses the conversion of standardized messages from the backend server into Outlook objects, such as IPM.Note. The handler provides an independent layer to different versions and formats of messages, so that calling components do not have to address the versions and formats of Office objects or command messages for the client add-on. The Exchange handler provides interfaces to the most important objects within Microsoft Office, including e-mail (IPM.Note), e-mail attachments, the calendar, tasks, and contacts.

Last but not least, the service bundling component hides the implementation details and distributes incoming calls to Duet-specific Web services or SAP ESA services, or any combination thereof. The criteria that determine which component will be used during implementation is based on the method that can best support the respective use cases within the application. The service bundling component also implements a method to resolve any Duet-specific IDs toward SAP item IDs where necessary. It is anticipated that the vast majority of these services will be executed synchronously for functionality, such as data validation and displaying information in action panes. In case of asynchronous[2] calls, the service bundling component will always reply with an acknowledgment confirmation and then route the reply through the Exchange handler back to the client. An example of such an asynchronous call can be found in team management when requesting all organization contacts for a given user.

In addition to these components, Duet Extensions also include a number of so-called "pluggable services" that interact with existing technology to enable user roles, authentication, security, and reporting, and provide a set of tools for configuration and customization. The pluggable services enable integration with preexisting technologies and provide functionality, such as user roles, authentication, security, and reporting. Since these capabilities are not Duet-specific, customers should be able to deploy any of these services from different vendors that support these standardized interfaces. It should also be possible to reuse existing solutions already installed on site.

Apparently, Duet Extensions can handle all communication between the client and the underlying SAP ERP system, because Duet Extension can gather the context and define the objects that are exposed to the user. Thus, those extensions invoke the relevant underlying SAP ESA services to talk to the underlying applications within the SAP ERP environment. As described previously in some cases, the responses may be handled asynchronously. To accomplish this, Duet Extensions transmit the data back to the local client through the Exchange handler, which completes a simple round trip of data from the UI within an action pane to the SAP ERP system and back.
The metadata that is available on the client resides within Duet Extensions, whose server also acts as a consolidation engine. Most businesses have an IT landscape using a number of different SAP systems, such as an SAP BW, SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP SCM (Supply Chain Management), or any number of non-SAP solutions. The Duet Extensions server unites one or more of these backend systems, by taking the metadata from various underlying systems and combining them based on the user and the user's role within the organization, and pushing it down to the client. As the users might not always be online, Duet must be careful in the way it communicates information back to the client, and additional queuing and caching may be required in the Extensions. The data is communicated from SAP ERP into the Exchange handler, which properly formats the information into an extensible markup language (XML) document (or a format that the client can then understand).

If a report is needed, information needs to be converted into a hypertext markup language (HTML)-based email, maybe with some kind of attachment. It also requires flagging the report with specific metadata that is not visible to the end user, but is rather attached to the e-mail body. This enables certain kinds of processes once it reaches the client environment. The client then interprets the metadata and dynamically combines it into the UI screen before presenting the notification of the report to the user (e.g., the final budget status notification). The rules gathered from the back-end system are converted into metadata that the client can understand, and the gap between the two systems is bridged. Because Duet is role sensitive, information presented and executions available to the end user depend on the user's role within the organization (whether the user is an employee or a manager, for example).

The Role of Microsoft Office Add-On

Further, the Microsoft Office Add-On enables communication between the local Microsoft Office client with the Duet Extensions and the SAP system through a metadata portal and storage interface. In other words, the Office Add-On, also known as the Duet Client, represents the Office screen add-ons based on metadata, since it uses the master data for drop-down menus or business rules and then triggers activities in the principal SAP system through either synchronous or asynchronous Web services calls. Metadata descriptions of the various applications are interpreted through the engine, which supports integration with various kinds of host software. The engine also provides Outlook integration, personalization, Excel integration, InfoPath (recently renamed into Windows Workflow Foundation [WF]) integration, and metadata-defined forms. Duet also supports SAP Business Workflows through Microsoft Outlook.

In order to illustrate how data is routed through the Duet architecture, one needs to understand that a typical Microsoft Office user often creates status reports of one kind or another. Using Duet, this process is accelerated since the Office interface already shows which reports an information worker can subscribe to, and offers templates for creating new ones (e.g., a budget report needs to be delivered every Monday morning at 9 a.m., or the project manager wants an alert only after the project has reached 80 percent of total budget consumption). All of these kinds of activities can be done using the local client, in which case it is Microsoft Office combined with Duet.

The Client or Office Add-On is responsible for representing the UI, based on metadata and other kinds of desktop information. For this purpose, the Client/Add-On is separated into three major parts: 1) runtime engine; 2) cashing mechanism; and 3) output queue.
The runtime engine interprets metadata in order to understand which business object is being exposed (a budget report, leave request or time entry, for example). Through these exposed objects, the Office Add-On is able to create subclasses of the existing objects within Microsoft Office. For instance, a "time entry" would then be treated as a subclass of an "appointment" object, and these classes would be exposed through the UI within the action pane environment. In addition to describing objects, the metadata also describes the UI screen and actions that can be triggered from within the user screen. This additional metadata, available on the client side, includes both generalized personalization data and some master data. The generalized personalization data, for example, determines which fields become available in the action pane, whereas the master data, for example, determines which project's budget is being assessed or the default status report profile. The engine's metadata form definition component is the primary method used to customize Duet forms and dialogs, whereby administrator users, using a metadata definition, can customize the action pane, custom dialogs, or Outlook custom forms. This level of customization also enables easy text replacement and user screen fields localization.

The caching mechanism is responsible for maintaining the proper metadata on the client machine, and is based on the user's role and supplies the functionality to store a user's metadata based on user role and data instances. It also stores metadata in a secure manner, and provides access to metadata when disconnected from the Duet server. Furthermore, the cache includes deployment capabilities that deliver application assemblies proactively to a user's machine. Last but not least, the cache provides offline data retrieval for the Duet by switching between the offline store or to the online Duet server when accessing data by using hints from either metadata parameters or other configuration information. The cache component also provides the first-time provisioning and deployment of reference data, reference data expiration refresh rules, and local data storage. In summary, the caching component ensures that metadata, master data, and additional files and objects are kept available locally and are up-to-date. The component is able to store this data on the local client without the need to continuously synchronize and resynchronize with the backend SAP ESA services. And by inserting a validity period into that, Duet can always keep the data cache up-to-date with regards to changes from the back-office system. It is not so much a push for updated information, but rather a pull from it, which should also speed up the end-to-end communication by preloading some of the data that the underlying system will request.

The third component of the Client, the output queue, provides the functionality to enable users to initiate actions while being offline, which are then invoked whenever a connection becomes available. The output queue component is invoked when a user triggers an activity, such as saving a time entry. It then takes the selected business object and triggers activities in the underlying SAP ERP system through either synchronous, or asynchronous Web services calls, which then come into the SAP environment within the Duet Extensions, through the abovementioned service bundling component. This component allows the Duet to compose multiple underlying Web services into a single one for, say, performance improvement, or for using the result of a first call for a second call.
Queued actions are serviced as soon as possible. If online, these calls are serviced in short time intervals; if off-line, the calls are stored for invocation later. Logically, the output queue is used only for asynchronous calls, and to support this functionality, the output queue provides interfaces to be able to "flush the queue" when the backend server is available. Calls made by the output queue to the service bundling component in the backend system will generally respond synchronously with acknowledge confirmation. Duet supports the deployment of applications to the client machine as complete units containing the metadata, assemblies, additional required client components, and reference data required to execute the application. This will occur automatically through a deployment mechanism and includes upgrade control in the form of versioning.

The relationship between the two software powerhouses, Microsoft and SAP, has been intriguing to put it mildly, at least since Microsoft's entry into the enterprise applications arena in late 2000 (see Microsoft 'The Great' Poised to Conquer Mid-market, Once and Again ). While the relationship has been depicted by many through a myriad of antonyms, such as "on-off", "hot-cold", or "love-hate", currently, it can best be described as "mutually civil". One can even find some uncanny similarities between the two, such as the occasional involvement in intellectual property lawsuits (whether as plaintiffs or defendants) or through the relatively recent, almost coinciding departures of technological visionaries, Satya Nadella and Shai Agassi, respectively (although Nadella was merely transferred within Microsoft, to the search and ad group that will hope to fend off Google's undeniable threat).

Microsoft and SAP then entered a "strange bedfellows" or co-opetion phase in their relationship, by dallying in business applications. Acting like two high-profile on-again, off-again celebrities, the two were dismissive about questions from the press and analysts about the inevitable competition this partnership would create (i.e., responding "We do target different sizes of companies"). Nonetheless, this stance become moot owing to SAP's forays into small business via SAP Business One and Microsoft's propping up of Microsoft Dynamics AX, as an upper mid-market solution. Then came a perceived snub by SAP for opting for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) as a primary development environment for its infrastructure and development platform (while there is, nonetheless, some lesser valuable interface options for the counterpart Microsoft .NET Framework environment). However, SAP's move was quite logical given the still lingering perception of Java's better fit for larger enterprises (see Understand J2EE and .NET Environments Before You Choose ).

Any hard feelings between SAP and Microsoft were short lived, as we found out in 2004 when the two were engaged in secret (and startling) merger talks, which was quickly put ad acta before the news broke (whether for good remains to be seen). For most of that year, both vendors had to spend time explaining their separate forays into developing next-generation, service oriented architecture (SOA)-enabled products. Then 2005 seemed to be the year of bliss, where the two expressed mutual respect, and even worked jointly on a commercially available product featuring best of both worlds. Specifically, SAP and Microsoft joined together to leverage the openness of the SAP NetWeaver and Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) blueprint (see Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver ) with the .NET-based architecture of Microsoft Office desktop applications suite (see Subtle [or Not-so-subtle] Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement ). The result was the joint product code-named Project Mendocino (the name of a town halfway between the companies' respective US headquarters) that promised to deliver familiar Microsoft Office desktop management and productivity tools as the façade for the heavy-duty lifting processes of SAP's enterprise applications. In other words, Project Mendocino extended and automated selected business processes from SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) through the familiar Microsoft Office user interface (UI), by providing role-relevant displays of information while retaining SAP applications' process context and the necessary collaboration and analytic tools.
Portal and other SAP entry points, such as SAP Web Dynpro or the recently unveiled NetWeaver Business Client, (formerly known as Project Muse), which is still needed for power users to gain full access to more advanced SAP business applications and processes. However, for casual information workers that require quick access to simple repetitive processes, such as billable time entry, leave request, or budget monitoring, Project Mendocino came in handy, because it eliminated the reliance on power users and business application experts. At the same time, it also connected business process applications with commonly used productivity applications more seamlessly. The product's capabilities included personalization, object synchronization, report distribution, alerts or notifications, a form-based approval process, and offline functionality. Through these capabilities employees and managers had the potential to realize greater efficiency and flexibility within a number of self-service processes. Other potential benefits revolved around higher productivity, better decision-making, audit traceability and transparency, and faster user adoption.

More information on the initial product's processes, capabilities, and benefit can be found in Major Vendors Adapting to User Requirements and in the book Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation, by Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern (2006 O'Reilly Media). For now, it suffices to say that Project Mendocino initially enabled information workers to perform tasks, such as time management, budget monitoring, organization management, and leave management via their desktops, using features like extended application menus, an SAP-specific smart panel, and business analytics delivered via Microsoft Excel, smart business documents in Microsoft Word, and synchronization Microsoft Outlook between Microsoft Exchange Server and SAP ERP processes.

Both Microsoft and SAP pledged to sell and support the product, which was first released to fifty pilot customers in late 2005 before it was made generally available (GA) in mid-2006 with its official name: Duet. At the time critics were quick to note that the product covered only a handful of simple business processes and that it was more "eye candy" than an "order winner". However, they did see that the product would also be a decisive factor for prospective customers to implement the entire SAP ERP suite (or, for existing SAP users to migrate to its latest release). Critics also expressed caveats of necessary technological prerequisites and hidden costs for Duet. Namely, the client machine runs on Microsoft Windows XP with Microsoft Office 2003 installed, while the Duet hub (which will be detailed later in this report) requires Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or higher and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or higher, including Microsoft Active Directory 2000 (however, there are no additional installation, software, or hardware requirements for existing Microsoft Exchange Server landscapes). Moreover, on the SAP side, users have to be on SAP ERP 2004 (including NetWeaver) or higher, while some most recent Duet implementations require additional SAP modules, such as Employee Self-Service, SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) 4.0, SAP SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) 5.0, or SAP BW (Business Warehouse) 3.5. The early product release also ran only in English and within Outlook (as opposed to Word or Excel).
More Than Meets the Eye

In addition to disseminating useful SAP data among knowledge workers (outside of its traditionally limited power-user dispatch list), Duet has been crucial for being a "proof of concept" model illustrating the potential development and adoption of composite applications, especially when the result of a joint collaboration between two software giants and market influencers.

Indeed, Duet is one of the first examples of a tangible SOA-based composite application product. While several tools use SOA conceptually, in ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, this tool is based on consuming services in concrete ways that benefits almost every information worker. Duet showed how SOA can be applied to the user experience through familiar desktop applications, and for some users, it will deliver functionality that supersedes the need to work directly with any line-of-business (functional department) or back-office enterprise applications. By exposing functionality and giving even the most casual users an easier way to update data that normally resides only in the back-office system, Duet embraced the innovative potential of SOA services. It exposes features from underlying ERP systems in new ways that create more value. And these services can be used together, even though they were probably written for a system that was designed before SOA was someone's figment of imagination.

This fulfills one of SAP's short-term goals for ESA (SAP's variant of the SOA blueprint) adoption—to create simple services (software components, if you will) that work on top of legacy applications already used by organizations. In the future, the entire stack which encompasses ERP, CRM, and all other SAP Business Suite solutions will eventually evolve to use business objects as their underlying application. Instead of having a rigid and unwieldy monolithic set of applications, SAP is creating a collection of business objects that can be applied in more flexible ways. By late 2007, there will be more services to choose from than the ones used to support Duet, since ESA follows the SOA format of "model once, run anywhere". Namely, instead of hard-coding multiple solutions that apply to different domains, ESA employs business objects or services that are modeled in a way that allows them to handle different solutions. Duet is just one of many client-side solutions that ESA will enable.

To understand how Duet is in tune with SOA, it is important to become familiar with the new stack defined by SAP ESA, and to understand what a composite application is. Webopedia defines a composite application as an application that consists of more than one type of service delivered from an SOA environment. It can range from functionality to entire applications. Services are generated through "local" application logic that controls how services interact with each other. For more information, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, and BPEL.

As a composite application, Duet overlaps with nearly every part of the new SOA stack:

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User screens. Duet uses the familiar Microsoft Office desktop interface, which is achieved not by hard-coding the UI, but through backend modeling and deploying it to the client.
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Process orchestration. Duet uses a communications hub referred to as the Duet Extensions to route data to and within the ERP system.
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Process integration. Using the aforementioned extensions, Duet translates data from Microsoft Office applications such as Excel into a format that is easily understood by existing ERP tools and their respective enterprise services.
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Process workflow. All of the usual workflow processes within SAP ERP take place within the context of Microsoft Office's desktop tools.
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Distributed data. The ability to cache data for working online or offline also plays an important part in the functionality.

Other applications being created by SAP will use different parts of the stack to enable different solutions. However, other services created for Duet should indirectly benefit all SAP ESA users by increasing the total pool of objects in the SAP Enterprise Services Repository. Also, every service and application being created for Duet is designed so they can be used by other applications within the ESA environment. For instance, timesheet entry services are part of the Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS) feature that will be used by many applications that rely on timesheet recording and account assignment.

The Duet Architecture Outlined

Despite seemingly simple processes that Duet enables, the product exemplifies how serious an undertaking a commercially available composite application can be. When the goals of Project Mendocino (now Duet) were first formulated, it reportedly[1] became clear that two very different architectures needed to be brought together. On the one side was the ubiquitous client application, which required local data storage, while on the other side was the proverbially complex SAP ERP environment. The different technologies in this case reportedly made it quite easy to select Web services as the interface technology, since both camps added standards-based Web services support in their last releases. However, in this case, simply connecting these two worlds using Web services did not offer a comprehensive enough solution. Namely, the goals required more extensibility, because SAP wanted to enable a model-driven environment on the client side, which would allow Duet to push additional screens and updates to the user without the need to continuously run through an installation and reinstallation whenever business needs changed.

On top of that, Microsoft Office currently works in online as well as offline modes. This capability had to be maintained in Duet as well, since users had to be able to trigger activities while being offline which would later have to be automatically resynchronized once their machines went back online. At the time, Microsoft and SAP also realized that the involved disparate system components (i.e., Microsoft Exchange Servers, Microsoft Office, and SAP ERP systems) are of such a high value to customers that massively updating those environments (and exposing the existing system landscape to any unnecessary disruption) would be unacceptable. SAP and Microsoft weighed these requirements carefully and realized that there was a the need for a communications hub that would sit in the middle of the two existing environments and "mediate" communication and processes. The hub collects various configurations from the back-end system, determines the objects that should be exposed, and decides which activities the user can trigger and how all of that ties together within the user screen. The communications hub is also referred to as the Duet Extensions, which are connected with the Microsoft Office client and the SAP ERP system. The result is that there are three primary parts to Duet's architecture: 1) the Duet Extensions; 2) the Microsoft Office Add-On; and 3) SAP ERP foundation.

The Role of Duet Extensions (the Hub)

The Duet Extensions are implemented in the Microsoft .NET Framework and use the J2EE technology. They act as a hub between the client side and the SAP ERP systems on the server side and enable these two to talk with each other. They also include the application description in the form of metadata (or "data about data") and cater the metadata to the client side. The major components of the Duet Extensions include 1) metadata repository interface and storage; 2) Microsoft Exchange handler; and 3) service bundling.

One of the biggest challenges (or business pain points) for pharmaceutical manufacturers (or life sciences companies) is the long cycles that are required for research and development (R&D) and product approval. This is particularly a challenge for manufacturers of generic drugs, for which cycle times can average 20 months or more (and the full time-to-market period upwards of 12 years).

Why are long cycles a problem?

Simply put, it comes down to the familiar equation that “time = money.” More time needed means more capital spent, and manufacturers watch their bottom lines slip farther and farther away. To begin to formulate a plan to address the issue of long cycle times, it’s important to understand the factors that contribute to this challenge.

Long R&D cycles happen for a number of reasons. One is that there has been increasing need to comply with regulations, including the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 11, for pharmaceutical manufacturers that are employing methods for electronic record-keeping and electronic and digital signatures.

This increasing need often means that additional administrative time must be spent on ensuring that the technical and procedural protocols are set up correctly and doing what they are supposed to do.

Another reason for long cycle times has to do with the need to ensure that all stages of product development are adequately documented for audits. Whether a manufacturer is using paper or electronic methods of data storage, there must be a reliable, consistent, secure, and accessible method of storing all documents related to the research, development, manufacture, and release of all drugs.

Every change to a document must be retained, and the integrity of the versions kept intact. For manufacturers straddling the line between paper-based and electronic methods, all paper-based documents need to be transferred and saved in digital form, a process that can require considerable time for scanning or manually entering data.

What are the business risks involved in longer R&D cycles and product approval?

Fewer products can be developed or manufactured concurrently, which means fewer products get to market. And fewer products to market can mean a decrease in the company’s in-coming cash flow (i.e. decreased profits). Additional worry may come from the fact that with this increase in time-to-market, other competing manufacturers may develop a similar drug and release it sooner, thereby further diminishing profits due to lost market share and a shortened product life cycle. A delayed or lengthened cycle time can seriously affect the return on investment (ROI) for a given new drug or product.

What can help?
A software solution that implements automated controls that address compliance issues, including 21 CFR Part 11.

How does 21 CFR Part 11 relate to product R&D and approvals?

For all of the processes involved in getting a drug to market, strict policies must be established and followed by a company regarding the use of electronic records. Each step of product R&D and approval processes must be, according to the dictates of 21 CFRR Part 11, consistent, reliable, and repeatable—in other words, each version of every document must be archived and easily retrieved for the purposes of inspection or auditing.

But this thorough documentation means that the approval process can be streamlined with automated functionality, as the time needed to send documents to the approving individual(s) will be reduced (with a centralized system, all users may have access to documents, providing they are authorized to do so according to level-specific electronic signatures; also, the system can be configured to send automatic notifications). Consequently, document turnaround time can be reduced, while the authenticity, integrity, non-repudiation, and confidentiality of documents is assured.

Furthermore, for the purposes of an audit, the automated system can aid a company by streamlining document retrieval. With a system that helps you organize and maintain accurate records of all processes, time isn’t wasted on following a lengthy paper trail of documents to ensure that changes have been authorized and tracked, and that all paper versions are now available.

However, it is very important to realize that using a software application off the shelf to automate all processes involved in electronic signatures, document archiving and change management, and tracking and auditing, will not automatically render your company compliant with 21 CFR Part 11.

You must also ensure that you configure the system so it provides you with the validation you need to be compliant—you must establish rules and policies for the application that are consistently followed so you can be assured your processes for electronic signatures and data management are compliant. Both procedural and administrative controls must be in place to ensure process compliance.

Software applications that can help pharmaceutical manufacturers with the issues described above include

* SAP ERP by SAP
* IFS Applications
* DEACOM integrated accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
* Adobe LiveCycle by Adobe

For insight on the software selection process, check out TEC’s ERP for process manufacturing evaluation center.

Are you in the pharmaceuticals or life sciences industry? Tell us about the solution you’re using to reduce cycle times and manage regulatory compliance.

Infor has accomplished much recently in terms of laying the foundation for and developing a product portfolio that meets the needs of customers old and new, as well as those inherited from the vendor's recent acquisitions. Behind Infor's success lies its open SOA strategy, based on the Software Fortress Model (please see part two of this series, Ambitious Plans and Promises: An Enterprise Software Vendor's Course of Action ). For a general overview on Infor's recent developments, please see part one of this series, Ambitious Plans and Promises: An Enterprise Software Provider Keeps Its Word.

While skepticism is understandable from some—especially the over-promised and disillusioned Baan customers, as well as some market observers—most of the market should actually be pleased to hear what Infor is pledging. "Doubtful Thomases" might question whether the former SSA Global, MAPICS, etc. were really killing these products and if Infor is just making itself look good by paying lip service to the promise of improvements. Certainly, only time will tell whether Infor will make good on these promises, or if it will just repeat the sins of the solutions' predecessors.

To be sure, this decision does not come from the goodness of Infor's heart. Rather, it is based on sound economic (i.e., the great revenue potential from the several thousand existing Baan IV and V customers worldwide) and strategic reasons (i.e., Infor envisions Baan and LN as "platform" rather than "mature" enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, having viable future road maps, including SOA bus and enhancements), as well as to create goodwill (press relations).

At first, Infor may have been tempted to enable migrations to Infor ERP LN 6.1, but it is likely the vendor has realized that the migration paths for Baan IV and V customers, their systems significantly customized, would be prohibitive and daunting. Possibly then, it is more feasible and justifiable to keep all three product releases on their own SOA-enablement and functional enhancements paths. Sure, the research and development (R&D) cost for Infor will increase to a degree (given their monolithic structures, Baan IV, V, and LN will have to be divided into separate fortresses), but that is certainly a lesser price to pay than losing those customers outright to the competition.

Therefore, given three different product road maps, the details are currently sketchy about what customers can hope for in terms of functionality, as well as how useful these products will be in light of some customers having modified the product to a level where it is hardly recognizable.

In any case, if Infor will indeed be adding features, that can only be good. There have been broad indications of enhancements being made to financial management, supplier relationship management (SRM), human capital management (HCM), servicing, warehousing, and manufacturing functions. Moreover, this might even be more about Infor Open SOA and Infor's need to cross sell products to these customers, since Infor's revenue model is based on keeping the maintenance stream going and cross selling products. To that end, via the Open SOA approach, Infor will likely offer the Baan install base extended-ERP systems from other Infor point solutions, particularly in the areas of corporate performance management (CPM)/analytics, supply chain management, (SCM), business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce capabilities, mobile applications, and so on.

Some skeptics may also point out that the initial additions planned for Baan IV and V are mostly what we would call regular upgrades and extensions. However, for those Baan users whose product instance is not that badly modified, the price of becoming compliant and up-to-date on their own (i.e., using their own regulatory and IT experts) might be much higher than the price of being reinstated into the service and maintenance contract (see What Is the Value Proposition of Support and Maintenance?).

Further, the details on IBM's current Baan and LN capabilities and its success in reselling these Infor products are also sketchy at this time, and we will have to wait and see if the two companies actually sell some of these solutions. IBM used to be a major Baan implementer in the 1990s, but like almost all other leading systems integrators (SIs), it has since all but disbanded the Baan practice. These experts have moved on to implementing other ERP products, and it is questionable how easily one can ramp up the competencies of Baan and LN once again.

Furthermore, IBM resells many mutually competing enterprise applications products; while the total number of deals for IBM is certainly significant, deals for each individual ERP vendor are very rare. Yet, vendors like Infor or Lawson Software like the fact that IBM resells their product, due to the added credibility IBM's name gives these products in the marketplace, but it is questionable how much revenues they can actually expect.

In any case, while skepticism is understandable in light of the past, the fact is that 22 percent of Infor's employees (about 2,400) work in the R&D department. Looking at this from another angle, Infor's R&D expense last year was about $400 million (USD), which represents 18 percent of its total revenues—an amount significantly higher than the software industry's average of 14 percent. Such numbers are indications of a vendor that "means business" and that wants to be in for the long haul—and the vendor certainly has no illusions that this will be a "cakewalk" (easy).

In the first part of this series (please see Quote-to-order: New Ingredients in the Recipe for Success), the emerging quote-to-order (Q2O) sphere was discussed in terms of its history and current developments, as well as how software providers are rising to the challenge of meeting their customers' Q2O needs. The second part, Quote-to-order: Newcomer Causes a Stir in the Market began an in-depth analysis of how the vendor BigMachines has been claiming a space for itself, serving clients in the high tech industry with its Q2O solutions.

BigMachines' Differentiation

BigMachines' differentiation from its competitors, especially from the "old-guard" (with client/server on-premise technologies), comes from many directions. The lean front-end (LFE) moniker is meant to indicate that BigMachines is "leaner" than its old-school competitors, particularly those with much broader enterprise suites, because

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Its solution is solely focused on managing the full end-to-end inquiry-to-order process (quoting, configuration, and proposals) executed by customers' sales teams and channels, whereas most competitors stop short of truly empowering sales with one generalist solution that tries, suboptimally, to manage all aspects of the sales order process.
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The on-demand technology and implementation methodology takes less time and resources than implementing older technology based on client/server or on-premise technology—in other words, "faster is leaner." Additionally, on-demand administration tools can allow customers the flexibility to maintain and change their solution over time as their businesses change, which is another fundamental shift from older technologies.
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Native reporting and analytics come on top of customization via on-demand administration tools and self-administration by customers. The user interface (UI) can be tailored to match distinctive customer quoting processes, which leads to custom implementation (system configuration) rather than custom programming for each customer.
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BigMachines' team has process expertise and experience deploying the solution across a variety of industries for the most complex applications, while its management team has experience working for the world's best and leanest companies: McKinsey & Co., Case, Hewlett-Packard (HP), General Electric (GE, with a Six Sigma Black Belt entitlement), Dell (also a Black Belt holder), Accenture, etc.

BigMachines has also made substantial investment in services and support over the past several years. The vendor's press release of July 2008 notes that

[t]he company has expanded its Customer Support program to include a new online Support Center, an interactive customer idea forum called "My BigIdea", and online customer collaboration tools. BigMachines' online Support Center provides the company's global customers with a single point of entry to a repository of support information and tools, as well as an interactive community to share best practices and drive innovation in product design and development. In addition, Web 2.0 community applications have been added, including My BigIdea, an interactive forum where customers can submit their own ideas for product enhancements. Using My BigIdea, other customers can view the suggestions, add their own comments, and vote on the ideas they would like to see implemented. My BigIdea provides a wealth of information to the company's Product Management team as they plan and prioritize product roadmaps.

This is the same type of collaboration platform implemented by both Starbucks ("My Starbucks Idea") and Dell ("Ideastorm").

Other new support features include the following:

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an integrated global customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage customer accounts and contacts
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an online support center Web portal to provide a single point of access for customers
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a helpdesk with new voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) system integrated with a CRM system to ensure that BigMachines' support agents have relevant customer information at their fingertips


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a customer knowledge base to provide access to a comprehensive solutions database online, 24/7, 365 days a year
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online customer collaboration tools to share ideas within the customer community and directly with BigMachines staff
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dashboards and metrics-reporting tools to track and monitor helpdesk case load, including causes, volume and frequency of issues, and patterns and trends over time, to ensure continuous improvement

Additionally, the July 2008 press release states that "BigMachines has also created a new Customer Success Management team. Customer Success Managers are responsible for proactive communication to customers, sharing best practices, and ensuring that BigMachines['] customers achieve full adoption and value."

Given that the above traits are not necessarily applicable to distinguishing among software-as-a-service (SaaS) Q2O peers (such as Firepond, Webcom Inc., Click Commerce, Sterling Commerce, etc.), BigMachines touts its leadership with more than 100 successful customers. Two enterprise-strength data centers with guaranteed uptime and the product's scalability and internationalization are also advantageous here. As mentioned earlier, BigMachines has also established partnerships with leading global services firms for global implementation services and customer support capability.

Since Statement on Auditing Standards 70 (SAS 70) audits are a big deal for all on-demand applications providers that want to sell into large enterprise clients, BigMachines' hosting partners are SAS 70 Type II–certified, and the vendor is undergoing its own stringent SAS 70 audit, to be completed mid-2008. Compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX; see Thou Shalt Comply (and More), or Else: Looking at Sarbanes-Oxley) is also important in the sales quoting space, particularly concerning documented approvals for pricing or discounting by representatives and channels, and for customer's contract pricing. BigMachines has also helped many of its customers with these issues.

Complex Industrial Machinery Experts

BigMachines has "ruled" the market segments of complex industrial and process machinery that handles liquid, gaseous, and solid materials, such as pumps, valves, actuators, compressors, mixers, agitators, etc. The vendor's staff is thus well-versed in specifications that include the valve's operating conditions (such as fluid properties, size, desired materials of construction, and connection type), as well as the actuator type and other related accessories.

In the case of mixers and agitators, staff are quite "au fait" (fully competent) with the detailed specifications of things like viscosity, blending times, and volume of the material. It is critical that such information be encapsulated in the software system because it determines specifications such as the motor speed, impeller design, and shaft length of the product. From these specifications, the user can then select such options as end connection, body material, actuator type, seal type, and material, while the online configurator can also dynamically generate figure numbers, bills of materials (BOMs), and drawings to help an engineer complete a plant design.

To be even more attuned to this target market, BigMachines has opted to participate in the initiative of the nonprofit consortium FIATECH AEX. This initiative will eventually include the development of standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) schemas for motors, air coolers, reciprocating compressors, pressure vessels, centrifugal fans, centrifugal compressors, control valves, storage tanks, relief valves, and transmitters.

But, to also expand from these niche industries, BigMachines has lately found and penetrated new markets for expansion and growth, including high tech, software, networking hardware, medical instruments, and services markets. In a dramatic shift, these new high tech and other markets now represent over 70 percent of BigMachines' customers acquired over the last several years. The SaaS CRM market is more heavily dominated by these newer industries, and the faster growth expected of SaaS versus traditional client/server technology will likely continue this trend.

Multi-tenant "SaaS-y" Debates

To get into subtle multi-tenant SaaS nuances, BigMachines has a hybrid SaaS model with a multi-tenant database and dedicated Web front-ends for each customer. The application is delivered as SaaS, and unlike several of its competitors, BigMachines doesn't have a parallel client/server on-premise business, and no off-line technology is required to set up and maintain its software.

Like the rest of its product suite, BigMachines' administration engine (for system setup and maintenance) is fully on-demand and delivered only via the Web. This engine enables flexibility for users to add channel partners (value-added resellers [VARs], distributors, third-party agents, etc.) with or without licenses to other integrated applications. Also, fully on-demand administration tools enable globally disparate administration teams. Some of the competitors, such as Firepond, claim to be "multi-tenant/on-demand," but in reality, they only have a multi-tenant user front end, whereas off-line client technologies required for all product data and rule maintenance with periodic publishing of the off-line client tool to a multi-tenant Web front end.

BigMachines' hybrid (in other words, not completely multi-tenant) architecture has the flexibility to allow customers to upgrade according to their needs and desired schedule, and not necessarily when the vendor decides to upgrade them or another of the customers wants to upgrade. The architecture also has the flexibility to tailor the UI to the unique needs of the sales processes of different customers and industries.

For example, e-commerce and channel scenarios, in which a distributor is guided through the sale process of a gas turbine, are fundamentally different from the way that a software company representative is guided through the modules, number of users, commercial terms, and service fees of a software and services implementation. These different users may require very different layouts of their configuration pages. Despite the single-tenancy of the UI, the solutions allow its customer administrators to change or maintain the product anywhere in the world from a Web browser.

Challenges Spare No One

However, Webcom, a competitor that has the pervasive multi-tenant SaaS solution as well as a traditional on-premise one, cites the customer's choice as an aspect of flexibility as well. In fact, there are indications that many quote-to-order (Q2O) buyers within the complex engineer-to-order (ETO) environment may still prefer the on-premise, behind-the-firewall deployment. That gives lots of maneuvering space to the likes of Cincom Systems and Experlogix. Cincom recently introduced a specific strategy for the SAP ecosystem for customers with product complexity beyond what the SAP Internet Pricing and Configuration (IPC) product can handle, while recently the Cincom Acquire product was certified for Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft .NET technologies.

Along similar lines, Experlogix is Dynamics-certified and also involved within Infor's ecosystem. Access Commerce too is integrated to QAD and Infor enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, and there is always the traditional single-tenant hosting option provided by these vendors.

The point is taken that BigMachines' customers very much value the flexibility to schedule (and test) their upgrades and interfaces. These companies are running mission-critical systems that process orders; not all enterprise systems are as critical, nor do they need this flexibility. Still, a single-tenant UI for each customer means more costs and less profitability for the vendor (a downside in addition to the distraction of having to track each customer's exact product release). Namely, one of the true benefits of a multi-tenant architecture is lower cost structures for the vendor to maintain (savings that are hopefully passed on to customers). In other words, every single customer gets the same attention when it comes to requirements: the vendor that does not maintain multiple product instances does not have to take resources away from enhancing the product.

After all, despite its impressive growth (Technology Evaluation Centers' [TEC's] estimate of the company's revenues are at about $10 million [USD]) and achievement of its profitability targets, BigMachines is still a small startup into which over $40 million (USD) of venture capital money has been invested, and one may never know how much longer the investors will patiently wait for the true "payday." Also, BigMachines' subscription pricing per user per month is somewhat higher than its SaaS peers.

While the vendor claims that it is good value for its leading product on the market (which also involves embedded reporting and analytics), others might look at it as the company's somewhat desperate need to grow faster and generate more cash flow for its investors. However, BigMachines believes premium products should carry premium prices, and the company must justify its value and high levels of re-investment into future products and services.

One challenge BigMachines must contend with is the competition presented by ERP players in the Q2O market. For one, prospective customers inevitably delay their decision to implement an Q2O system, as they try to validate an incumbent ERP provider's claim that its product can do the Q2O job as well as a system specially designed to handle Q2O processes and issues. Even when the company selects a Q2O specialist like BigMachines, one has to wonder whether it is a strategic decision or a tactical stop-gap measure (while the ERP provider catches up with the functionality).

Also, there are indications that Oracle and IFS are working on (or have completed) a single engine, which, as stated in a report from AMR Research about Oracle Configurator, "can be used for modeling both sales and back-end (engineering) product configuration, eliminating the need to synchronize sales and product configurators."

Thus, some Q2O players have espoused more value proposition by building much broader business-to-business (B2B) supply chain management (SCM) suites for multichannel commerce. The first one is Click Commerce, which was made private by Illinois Tool Works (ITW) two years ago, but remains an independent operating company (see Will a Tool Manufacturer and a Supply Chain Software Vendor 'Click' in Matrimony?). According to AMR research, while sales configuration remains a component of the suite, the company targets companies looking for the broader B2B e-commerce capabilities the suite offers, such as catalog management, guided selling, pricing, partner relationship management (PRM), warehouse management, spare parts optimization, and trade funds management.

Along similar lines, Sterling Commerce (which recently acquired Comergent) has meanwhile combined its configurator and PRM capabilities with other software assets to address broader customer order management. In 2007, Sterling announced an offering called Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, which addresses multichannel distributed order management (DOM) through fulfillment. It is needless to say that these two high-profile companies have no viability issues like their startup SaaS peers do.