“The key goal of our CRM program is to boost our win ratio. By using Duet Enterprise, we can help the sales force to work more efficiently and make smarter business decisions.”

Mandar Kumar Ananda, Senior IT Manager, Infosys Technologies

Infosys Technologies needed to ensure adoption of its SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to enhance sales force efficiency and sharpen business insights. Infosys deployed Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP Applications, a framework to unify collaboration, productivity, and business data. Using the solution, Infosys expects to enhance user experience and increase adoption, helping to improve productivity and decision making.

Business NeedsInfosys Technologies provides consulting, development, engineering, IT services, and outsourcing from more than 75 locations. Infosys specializes in a Global Delivery Model, whereby services are rendered from the location that can provide the best talent and highest efficiency. Infosys annual revenues exceed U.S.$5 billion, and more than 95 percent of its business is generated from existing customers.

To best capitalize on customer information, Infosys implemented SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. “SAP CRM helped us achieve back-end process consolidation and integration with our enterprise resource planning system,” says Mandar Kumar Ananda, Senior IT Manager at Infosys. “But to get intelligent insights into the sales pipeline, we needed to ensure that quality information was entered into the system throughout the sales process. That required us to ensure that the entire sales force uses SAP CRM.”

Salespeople spend up to three hours each day on the phone, meeting with colleagues from Infosys solution development, pricing, legal, and delivery teams located around the world. “Collaboration over customer accounts is their life, but the information that arises from these calls is easily lost unless every

detail is later entered into CRM,” says Arjun Basu, Lead Consultant, CRM, at Infosys.

Infosys leadership concluded that if the sales force used SAP as its primary work environment, it would be easier to capture knowledge throughout the sales process. This information could be reused to reduce repeat efforts and to gain insights that would help the company close deals and boost its win ratio. To achieve extended adoption of SAP CRM, Infosys needed to provide simple access to the application and ground it in a collaborative environment.

SolutionInfosys considered using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to “create collaboration tools for SAP,” explains Vinod Sai, Senior Technology Solutions Architect at Infosys. The company also embarked on a pilot project to create a plug-in for the Microsoft Outlook 2010 messaging and collaboration client to make business data from SAP available in Outlook 2010, a tool that the sales force uses every day.

The company was then introduced to Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint Server and SAP Applications. The solution provides an environment that allows organizations to combine collaboration,

Customer: Infosys TechnologiesWebsite: www.infosys.comCustomer Size: 127,779Country or Region: IndiaIndustry: Professional services—IT services

Customer ProfileInfosys Technologies, founded in 1981 and based in Bangalore, India, is an IT consulting company with more than 75 offices and development centers worldwide.

Software and Services Duet Enterprise for Microsoft

SharePoint and SAP Applications Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Microsoft Office− Microsoft Office Outlook 2010

SAP Software & Services SAP Customer Relationship

Management

For more information about Duet Enterprise, go to:www.microsoft.com/Duetwww.duet.comwww.sap.com/duetenterprise

Customer Solution Case Study

Professional Services Firm Uses Duet Enterprise as Surround Strategy for SAP

productivity, and business data by blending SAP applications with Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office. “Duet Enterprise offered the right set of capabilities to extract data from SAP and enable users to work with it in SharePoint and Microsoft Outlook,” says Sai. “The solution minimized custom development and offered collaboration.This was the right platform for us.”From mid-November 2010 to December 2010, Infosys conducted its first-phase deployment, which focused on account management for existing customers, because the company generates 95 percent of its revenue from this segment. The solution was deployed over six weeks and required minimal IT effort. By using Duet Enterprise, an Infosys manager can create a SharePoint Server 2010–based workspace for a customer account, upload documents, launch a discussion forum, and invite colleagues to join the workspace. SAP business data, such as past account performance and draft account plans, is automatically available in the workspace. By using single sign on, users can connect to SAP data from SharePoint Server 2010, without additional authorization steps.

Infosys plans to use Duet Enterprise to connect Outlook 2010 with SAP CRM so that through Outlook, a sales person can partake in SAP-generated workflows and access contact information that resides in SAP. Infosys will also integrate resources from its preexisting Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 portals into the Duet Enterprise environment. BenefitsThe environment, based on Duet Enterprise, required little development effort. Infosys will use it to ensure adoption of SAP CRM. With the ability to capture customer information throughout the sales process, Infosys can boost productivity and make better decisions.

Minimal Development EffortIt took Infosys six weeks to deploy the solution. The IT department used Duet Enterprise ready-to-use features, such as interoperability with SharePoint Server 2010 and Outlook 2010, and predefined templates for building workspaces. “With our former plug-in initiative, we had to

build a custom solution to get user profile information out of SAP and into Outlook,” says Basu. “We also had to install additional software on user’s computers. Duet Enterprise offered out-of-the-box single sign on, and required no additional software installations.”

Higher Adoption for CRMWith Duet Enterprise, Infosys managers now create collaborative workspaces on SharePoint Server 2010, making it easy for those involved in the sales process to share ideas, edit documents, and update information. “Instead of this collaboration happening over the phone where information is difficult to capture, all of this happens through SAP CRM, in the SharePoint Server 2010 workspace,” says Basu. “The sales force is much more likely to use the CRM system now because it is integrated into their daily tasks and exposes them to a useful, productive collaboration environment.”

Enhanced Productivity, Win RatioInfosys saves the information that is captured throughout the sales process in the collaborative workspace to SAP. “Now, we can easily look at similar past pursuits and proposals and learn from them. This helps employees be more productive, and, therefore, it speeds the sales process,” says Ananda. “The key goal of our CRM program is to boost our win ratio. By using Duet Enterprise, we can help the sales force to work more efficiently and make smarter business decisions.”

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2011