CRM as a service, Enterprise Services Architecture on the way SAP’s near and short-term product road map, revealed last week, will follow the topical trends of on demand and SOA.In July, SAP will release the first public version of Mendocino, a joint project with Microsoft that aims to integrate SAP’s ERP software with Microsoft Office. An early version will ship this month. Mendocino’s initial functionality will be fairly limited, but analysts said that its eventual goal, of allowing customers to use Office as an interface for accessing SAP’s back-office systems, will be a major boon to SAP.SAP also continued to drop hints about launching an on-demand CRM package to vie with Salesforce.com. SAP has offered no details about its planned product, which SAP executive board member Shai Agassi said will likely launch next year — quietly. “We won’t do the kind of announcement Siebel has done,” he said. An SOA effort, ESA (Enterprise Services Architecture), is also planned. SAP will transition NetWeaver from integration glue to a “business process platform,” which customers can use to assemble the thousands of enterprise-services models SAP intends to release over the next few years. Software Development