CRMKonvos #17 – Entering The Dark Side of the Cloud
#CRMKonvos #17 – The dark side of the Cloud – danger, hope, liability, subscription, privacy … are they all gone? Quo vadis on premise and managed services? We are looking at the dark side of the cloud, its effects, chances and possibilities. We are also analysing the acquisition of Emarsys by SAP, do a little breakdown of the Microsoft cloud services that got announced last week (MS Teams anyone?) and general perspectives. Is the coveted 360 degree on the customer an illusion? And there is some harsh reality facing some suboptimal corporate structures. Fair play, as lived by Zoho, is another topic to be covered … Expectations towards SAP and its Customer Data Platform CDP++ are going towards the next level. Is SAP planning to destroy the silos to create more transparency? Is CDP really some BS (hint: not really) or can it be used in a valuable (for the customer) way)? A CX platform or at least a #COTP (Customer oriented Transaction Platform) are possible ways. Lots of ground to be covered. This episode is in...
SAP to acquire Emarsys in an aggressive move
The News On October 1st, 2020 SAP announced its intent to acquire Emarsys, a leader in the personalization area and omnichannel customer engagement management specialist. The transaction is expected to be completed in Q2/2020 and still subject to regulatory approval. The purchasing price is not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Emarsys was funded with $55.3M US by Vector Capital in two funding rounds 2015 and 2016. Not being a financial analyst, I would expect a purchasing price of north of $ 500M US. Emarsys positions itself as a customer engagement platform that combines omni-channel automation, personalization, loyalty management and reporting/analytics. The company has more than 1,500 customers, makes about 2/3 of its revenues in the EMEA region and has a pretty strong partner network including technology and agency partners. Key commerce integrations include Adobe (Magento), Salesforce, Shopify and, of course SAP Commerce. On top of this, the platform brings prebuilt industry specific use cases and analytics into the fold. According to Christian Klein, CEO SAP, “once the transaction closes, SAP will enable brands to connect every part of their business to the customer, including experience data. We will deliver a portfolio for a ‘commerce anywhere’ strategy allowing for hyperpersonalized digital commerce experiences across all channels at any time”. Bob Stutz, president SAP Customer Experience, adds that “with Emarsys technology, SAP Customer Experience solutions can link commerce signals with the back office and activate the preferred channel of the customer with a relevant and consistently personalized message, allowing customers the freedom to choose their own engagement”. The bigger Picture The ability to segment in real time becomes more and more important,...
CRMKonvos – Mitch Lieberman on CX, CDP and Conversational Excellence beyondCXM
During this episode we talked with Mitch Lieberman who has quite some experience in the CRM industry, on the vendor- and analyst side. He was with Epiphany, Sugar, and with G2, to name but a few.He has the insight and the sharp mind that makes this conversation particularly interesting, without me diminishing the other ones, though.Mitch certainly got our grey matter into high gear during our conversation that started with CX, went into a solid discussion of the value (what is it?) of Customer Data Platforms, CDP, on to conversational systems – and back. Btw, what is a CDP? Let Mitch provide his interesting view.We learned a lot.You can, too.This conversation is in English, apart from a few minutes at the beginning and the...
SAP CX – A Deep Look into the Glass Ball
Earlier this year, a few days after attending SAP Sapphire reimagined, I asked Quo Vadis, SAP. At that time industry legend Bob Stutz led the CX group already for 8 months, with Esteban Kolsky being his chief of strategy. At this event there was hardly any mention of SAP CX. This is in spite of the CRM market being the fastest growing enterprise software market and in contrast to then CEO Bill McDermott’s bold statements that SAP will take Salesforce heads on. Esteban meanwhile changed his role and has become Head of Product, Customer Service and Sales for the SAP CX unit, which indicates that there is an emphasis on execution. And then, there was the announcement that Qualtrics, the company that basically defined the experience management market and that SAP acquired barely two years ago, will be brought public. So, something is happening. But still, there is no word about a strategy or a vision besides a few hints that Bob and Esteban gave during various webcasts or a blog post, in which Esteban gave a glimpse at what he sees as the next generation CRM. It should not surprise you that his thoughts have to do with platform, as the overall market for business applications, and especially the market for customer experience, has morphed into a platform market. This void of communicated strategy was supposed to be filled in early May. This communication was cancelled in the wake of Jennifer Morgan leaving SAP and Christian Klein becoming the sole CEO. This void shall be closed soon, after it lasted far too long. This indicates some alignment challenges...
CRMKonvos – beyondCXM: How to turn customers and employees into raving fans
#BeyondCXM. To turn customers and employees into fans as a possibiility to achieve sustainable business is what Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit as hosts discussed with Dr. Winfried Felser and Marc Schmid, CEO of Novadoo. Sometimes the magic of customer experience if found beyond normal processes and classic expectations and therefore individual, consumable, experiences. This happens especially if one offers a genuine and heartfelt ‘Thank you’ and with that creates an emotional bondo or relationship with the customer, instead of just a transactional one. Leading up to this: What are companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, or Zoho currently doing and how can these developments help with a Corona restart with ten times the current possibilities? Big topics, discussed in this CRMKonvos episode. The episode is in German...
CRMKonvos – The value of Tiktok for Oracle and the route beyond CXM
In this episode we had the pleasure to talk with fellow long time analyst, influencer and CRM industry observer Marshall Lager about what value TikTok could bring to Oracle – if any – and continued from there to experiences and experience management upto raising the question about what lies beyondCXM. Will it be purely technically driven or even philosophical? Find out in this episode fo the #CRMKonvos. And do not forget to tune into the next one, which will continue on the theme of going beyond CXM. This episode is in...
Why TikTok is a fit for Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle
Will ByteDance be able to sell some of its non-Chinese TikTok business or not? TikTok, the app that is all the rage with millenials who post thirty second movie clips and seem to have tremendous fun with it. And which got valued at more than $ 50 bn US before it was threatened with a ban in the US. It is less than a week to the deadline for an enforced shut down of the infrastructure. Time to jot down a number of seemingly, but not so random thoughts. Microsoft, in combination with Walmart, and Oracle, along with some unnamed additional investors, appear to be the frontrunners for making a deal. There are rumours about at least Twitter and Netflix showing some interest, too. If they are allowed to make a deal, and then willing to make it given the boundaries that are set by both, the US and the Chinese governments. There is tremendous pressure exerted by the US government citing a threat to national security because it could provide data about US users to China. This would make it necessary to ban the app in the USA if the US business stays under Chinese control. India already banned the app back in June 2020. China, in turn, updated its export control rules, restricting the export of “technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services” (login required). This is pretty much exactly what TikTok does. This means that the sale of technologies that are implemented by TikTok are now subject to ByteDance as the owner of TikTok getting a governmental approval. It is not unreasonable to...
Zoho Workplace – David has swung his sling
The News On September 10, 2020 Zoho announced Zoho Workplace, a new cloud based product bundle that is targeted at making a workforce more effective and efficient by bundling collaboration, productivity, and communication tools into one integrated set. As a part of this release Zoho enriched the applications that are part of Zoho Workplace with additional capabilities, following the vision of driving better business outcomes easier. Zoho Workplace consists of nine tightly integrated applications that are built on a common data model and that share a common dashboard and AI based enterprise search. The bundle is “centered around a full-featured business mail and office suite”. The nine applications Zoho Workplace consists of, are: Mail for business e-mail Cliq, as a messaging system Meeting for online conferencing Connect, a social intranet solution Writer for word processing Show for collaborative presenting Sheet for spreadsheets Workdrive as the cloud based document management system ShowTime for online training and/or webinars. Zoho did a study together with Beagle Research on what the main issues with current collaboration and productivity tools are. Results of this study include that applications that employees work with are “not intuitive and difficult to integrate”. Additional findings include that businesses often use different technology stacks which hampers productivity. Instead, they want “unified solutions that streamline complex processes”. Zoho Workplace is addressing this and as a result has seen a rapid adoption, “now supporting 2 million organizations, with 15 million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft”. The Bigger Picture...