Customer Experience is a Platform Play – Always Was

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 7, 2018 | Blog |

The most important tool that enterprise software vendors have in their respective arsenals is their platform. While Vinnie Mirchandani rightfully states that Enterprise Software Platforms have so far underwhelmed, Denis Pombriant proclaims them the new battleground. In my opinion it is not that new a battleground but as part of the Clash of Titans it is becoming more evident as a battleground. An enterprise software platform was always part of the battle for dominance in the customer engagement – or putting it into (marketing) industry lingo – customer experience market. It is actually an integral part of it. This is largely because of the ongoing commoditization of transactional business applications. But it was sexier to talk about shiny topics like engagement and experience than to talk about the grease and the machinery behind that drives and enables the technical delivery of engagements – note, that there are systems of engagement, but there is nothing like a system of experience. And now topics like chatbots, machine learning, AI, ambient computing, IoT, to name a few, made the machinery – the platform – the new black. A – perhaps not so – brief history When looking at the broad topic of CRM, customer engagement or customer experience, we have seen a lot of change happening since the early days of Sales Force Automation, SFA. Back in the early 90s one of the first topics has been SFA, with a focus on making a distributed sales force more effective and efficient. Contact management came even earlier, call center software and field service quickly followed. The emerging industry was dominated by little players...

SAP acquires CallidusCloud – A Snap Analysis from Down Under

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 1, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On January 30, 2018 SAP announced that its subsidiary SAP America, Inc. has entered into an agreement to acquire Callidus Software Inc., a leader in sales performance management and CPQ software. With a price tag of around $2.4 bn this is the most expensive acquisition SAP has announced in quite a time. With this acquisition SAP gets closer to the target of assembling the “most complete and differentiated portfolio to manage today’s customer experience” and claims that the combination of the CallidusCloud Lead to Money suite in combination with its own (Hybris) customer engagement suite creates a “leading solution portfolio”. SAP intends to consolidate the CallidusCloud solution set into its Hybris portfolio, with the sales cloud being the technical integration point of the software. As usual, the existing management team will stay on board. The Bigger Picture According to the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrants for Sales Performance Management (dated 15 January, 2018) and Configure, Price, and Quote Application Suites (dated 29 January, 2018) SAP catapulted itself into the leadership position of Sales Performance Management and into a visionary position in the CPQ market. Forrester Research already in their Forrester Wave: Configure-Price-Quote Solutions, Q1 2017 placed CallidusCloud into the leader section of their wave. With SAP’s Hybris solutions, including Gigya, SAP already has a powerful customer engagement suite, albeit with some gaps, a significant of which got plugged with this acquisition. While SAP CPQ is fairly capable on the C and P there is some deficiency on the Q. And it bases on grandfather IPC – not a bad engine, but one that is getting tired. Friend...

SAP CRM for S/4HANA – News from the Customer Frontier

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 6, 2018 | Blog |

It has been a little more than half a year now that I didn’t update on what is going on with SAP CRM and S/4HANA (which I will refer to as S/4 from now on; SAP it is time for you to change the unwieldy name to something more manageable). What Happened – So Far As you are well aware SAP is working on integrating a simplified version of SAP CRM into S4. The original roadmap offered a first customer release of an integrated product in early 2018, based on the September 2017 release of S4. The integration was planned as an add-on to S4. The initial scope of this CRM add on for S/4 was supposed to cover what is referred to as ‘core service’ functionality. This initial release shall be followed by ‘core sales’ functionality later in 2018. 2019 then is supposed to be dedicated to another round-off release covering further sales and service functionality, including loyalty management and migration tools. Roadmap and statements also so far have been fairly fuzzy about the strategic distinction between CRM as a part of S4 and the SAP Hybris line of CRM- and CEM systems. What does the Future have in its Basket? As it seems now, the release is not going to happen as fast as planned, nor in the originally planned way. Instead, in a webinar recently held for partners, SAP ‘announced’ two very interesting changes, with the second one likely also being a consequence of the first one. SAP CRM will no more be referred to as an add-on to S/4 but, at least for the service...

SAP and Microsoft bring their Partnership to the Next Level

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 4, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On November 27 SAP and Microsoft announced a new level of their strategic partnership. Their key messages are that S/4 is fully ready to run on Azure Microsoft is committed to SAP and will upgrade its internal financial systems to S/4 on Azure SAP will move a dozen (unspecified) “key internal business critical systems” to Azure SAP and Microsoft will “co-engineer, go to market together with premier solutions and provide joint support services to ensure the best cloud experience for customers” SAP and Microsoft will both provide documentation about their internal projects “to provide customers with guidance and enterprise architecture for deployment of SAP applications on Azure” Of course it is not much of a surprise to SAP “connoisseurs” that SAP is not running its business on just one instance of their own S/4 systems – still, twelve is a fairly sizeable number to migrate to Azure. It is also not much of a surprise that Microsoft is an important and committed SAP ECC customer. As such Microsoft, of course, has plans to upgrade to S/4. All in all this is the long due follow-up announcement to the 2016 SAP and Microsoft announcement of “empowering organizations to advance their digital transformation”. Back in the day I wrote that this announcement shows a lot of potential for the customer and that Microsoft likely will have more advantages to Microsoft than for SAP. In 2016 the announcement was also about Fiori. There is no word about it anymore today. As an interesting aside, Microsoft announced that it will use Azure AI (Cortana) and it’s analysis services for “more efficient...

Salesforce embraces the User Microsoft like – A Dreamforce Analysis

by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 13, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

Now that the major waves of Dreamforce 2017 have settled, the announcements and a good part of the running commentary has been delivered, it is time for me to have a look at my pre-Dreamforce predictions. Having been briefed before the event but unluckily not been able to attend (nor having had the time to write this piece earlier, I now have the advantage of having had more ‘thinking time” and can put the main announcements that we were briefed on into a bigger picture. On the backdrop of an IDC study (sponsored by Salesforce) that postulates 3.3 million new jobs and an overall GDP impact of 859 billion dollar by 2022 in the “Salesforce economy”, the announcements basically revolve around one single topic: How to enable the employees (of Salesforce customers and partners) to deliver to this magnitude. They were around Easier consumption of AI technology with Einstein, and improved IoT support, Opening up Trailhead to Salesforce customers in order to support company specific learning maps Enabling Lightning, as the platform to become fully themed, i.e. embrace the customers’ brands. Although technologically different I club the ability to create and easily upload branded mobile apps to the app stores into this Collaboration using Quip, the software that Salesforce acquired about a year ago, and a new partnership with Google And in order to emphasize on the fact that they are serious about enabling people individually, Salesforce resuscitated the dot com prefix “my”. Thus myEinstein, myTrailhead, myLightning, mySalesforce, myIOT and mySalesforce got born. A topic that might be slightly overlooked is covered by two sentences in the announcement of...