SAP unvieled the project plans for the Medocina at its Sapphire show in April sparking customer interest, The software is intended to link SAP's back-office ERP systems with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office software, allowing customers to use the familiar Microsoft user interface to work with back-office corporate data from systems such as accounting and human resources.

The first full version of Mendocino is scheduled for general release in July, but an early edition of the software will go out later this month to 40 customers for testing. In April, SAP plans to extend that release to an another 50 customers. SAP showed off a small demo of Mendocino's functionality at an SAP industry analyst meeting in Las Vegas yesterday. Corporate reports from SAP's software can be automatically sent to a user's Outlook box. Clicking on those reports allows the user to work with and make changes to them without leaving the Microsoft Office environment.

AMR Research Inc. analyst Bruce Richardson said the beauty of Mendocino is that it can reduce data entry redundancy. Today, users often need to transfer information back and forth from Microsoft's applications to SAP's; linking the systems eliminates that duplication. Richardson expects early Mendocino functionality to be limited, however. "To me, the real killer app for this is CRM, and that won't be at all in the first version," he said.

SAP executives refused to discuss pricing for Mendocino, but Richardson expects it to be low compared with SAP's traditional per-user software licensing fees. Mendocino is an excellent opportunity for SAP to expand its footprint within its customer base, he said -- plenty of organizations license Office for more of their employees than use SAP.

Source: ComputerWorldPrashanth RaiTag(s):SAP, Office