SAPPHIRE 2018 – The Return of the Suite
SAPPHIRE 2018. In an Orlando convention center, far away from Walldorf SAP holds its annual conference, boldly going where no one has gone before. But enough of this poor allegation to Star Trek although it reasonably sets the tone. The first two days gave a deep view into the company strategy. Condensed into two press releases the company laid out its vision of the future of CRM and intelligent enterprises. And, doing so, shot a few broadsides at the competition, especially Salesforce. The News “The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer … when you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. SAP intends to achieve this link of front- and back office by fully integrating an augmented suite of solutions that base on the SAP Hybris Cloud solutions into the digital core, the transactional back end. This integration is done via the SAP Cloud Platform. Additionally, it is fusing the new high profile acquisitions Gigya and CallidusCloud into the solution. C/4HANA; source SAP The Customer Data Cloud is what has been Gigya. This model, as well as S/4HANA, will be supported by the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, which is essentially a beefed up Master Data Management Solution around the SAP Data Hub. The second press release is about AI, IaaS, and more AI. SAP starts to talk more about conversational AI and Leonardo, as well as blockchain get more to the forefront. Mostly on the back end. The bigger Picture The...
Adobe and Magento tie the knot – a great move
The News On May 21, 2018 Adobe announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce. The obvious objective of Adobe is to integrate Magento’s commerce capabilities into their own experience capabilities. According to Brad Rencher, executive VP and general manger, Digital experience, with this acquisition Adobe is the “only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey”. Magento Commerce (Magento) is a ”leading provider of cloud commerce” software to merchants and brands. Magento covers both, B2C and B2B vendors. The company is listed as a strong performer for both, b2b- and b2c ecommerce solutions in this year’s Forrester Waves on Commerce Suites. The Bigger Picture Adobe is all about ‘delivering experience’. You should read the second part of friend Paul Greenberg’s recent ZDNet article on Adobe where he explains customer experience, brand experience, and consumable experiences – and where he sees Adobe in this triple – in his uniquely great fashion. A marketing suite like Adobe’s Experience Cloud needs channels into which the insights, that the marketing solution generates, are pushed. The most important one being e-commerce. E-commerce is also the channel that offers most potential. The technology is no more bound to just a commerce web site. The site is just one possible interface. As is a chat bot in Facebook Messenger. As is Alexa. Or Siri. Or Google Assistant. You get the picture. Further, an e-commerce site is not only the foremost channel to send marketing communications to (and to deliver experiences), but also one of the most important input channels...
Engagement, Experience, GDPR and Data Greed
As you might guess if you have read a few of my posts, I am not a person that is adverse to CRM and other customer facing technology that help improving the value created for said customer. Well, I am working in the CRM arena for more than twenty years now. A good part of what I am currently working on involves marketing automation software. And frankly, a lot of what I see and am allowed to do with and for forward-looking companies is just amazing! However! Talking to CEO’s and executives of CRM- and marketing automation companies about the European General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, I repeatedly heard statements like “it is a way for lawyers to make money”. And they probably are right with this assessment. Why? Because too many executives still bet their house on this law being a toothless tiger, or being under the radar; or they are claiming ‘legitimate purposes’ according to sentence f of section 1 in article 6 of the regulation, to justify their collection of data. Their legitimate purpose being the ability to serve targeted – or in new lingo relevant – advertisements. And I am sure they have some guidance by their lawyers, when arguing like this. However, there is the caveat to these legitimate purposes: the overriding “interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data”. Soon we will find out how serious the GDPR is taken by the European Union – whether it is a roaring lion or a toothless tiger. There are only a few days left until this law...
SAP Strategy – Decyphered
Much has happened in the SAP world in the past few months that were covered by the requisite number of announcements – and a good deal of analysis, including mine. SAP has Released its first release of S/4HANA for Customer Management Acquired CallidusCloud, a software company that focuses on sales enablement Announced a new ERP licensing model ‚for the Digital Age‘ While these three topics seem to be very different, combined they give a good insight into SAP’s strategy, and how the ERP world – sorry, the S/4 world, and the customer facing world are going to shape up. So, let’s have a brief look at these three announcements separately, and then connect a few dots. S/4HANA for Customer Management I have covered the migration of SAP CRM into S/4HANA a couple of times. S/4HANA for Customer Management is the ‘customer orientated’ part of S/4HANA and shall offer the core service- and sales functionalities of SAP CRM, using a unified data model. It is supposed to focus on what SAP calls the ‘heavy lifting customer processes’ and to support comprehensive core processes, thereby providing one central customer database. In other words this means that S/4HANA for Customer Management as part of S/4HANA will have a strong focus on (business) transaction processing and enabling the logistics that comes with fulfilment. One could say that it becomes a transaction engine. Keep that thought in mind. CallidusCloud Acquisition CallidusCloud provides leading solutions for sales performance management, CPQ, Contract Lifecycle Management, and more. This portfolio nicely plugs a few holes in the SAP Hybris portfolio and offers SAP options or at least another...
Salesforce Field Service Ligthning – Bulls Eye on better Experience?
The News On April 17, 2018 Salesforce announced their next-generation Field Service Lightning, which shall take customer experiences to new heights. The release implements four major improvements, which are: The ability to easily plug in an appointment management into a web site Simplified initiation and execution of return processes by customers and technicians The ability to select and dispatch repair crews for more complicated service jobs based upon abilities and availabilities A guided setup using a visual wizard to set up Field Service Lightning and that reduces the number of clicks necessary to get started by approximately two thirds on average. Below is the full text of the announcement. Alternatively you can read it here. Next-Generation Field Service Lightning Takes Customer Experiences to New Heights Paolo Bergamo, SVP and GM, Field Service Lightning & Mobile 4.17.18 If you’ve ever spent a day waiting for the washing machine repair person or the utilities worker to show up, you know how trying it can be. But, when that employee shows up on time, armed with the right parts and is able to fix your problem on their first visit, you’re amazed. Even delighted. It feels like the company has your back. Here at Salesforce, we’re laser-focused on provided a connected customer experience. That’s the main reason why we launched Field Service Lightning two years ago. We wanted to extend the world’s #1 service platform, Service Cloud, to field service – to equip mobile employees and dispatchers with all the information they need to provide customers with a connected experience that simply “wows”. And today we’re excited to...
CRMEvolution 2018 – A Good-Bye, a Hello, and some not so random Thoughts
Just back home from CRMEvolution it is time to do a little recap on this year’s instance of the conference. This year the conference was co-chaired by Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, two of the most accomplished independent analysts and influencers around. And also two great persons! It is with a sad I that we see Paul saying good-bye to chairing the conference after 2018 but then Brent is likely to be a very good successor. It will be interesting to see where he will add his style, connections, and background to the conference. This year, we have seen an Amazon keynote for the first time, which I reckon is one of the first marks Brent set as a chair. CRM Evolution: The Main Themes This year there have been some main themes; none of them really surprising, if one follows the industry: It is all about people, not about technology. And in order to successfully get things done in the coming years people need to ‘unlearn’ a thing or two, in order to become open for solving challenges in the novel ways that are required. This point was already hammered down in Brian Solis’ opening keynote. Iteration (doing the same in a better way) doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. Thriving in future will require more innovation (doing new things) and increasingly disruption (doing new things that make the old ones obsolete). At the same time it is crucial to keep one’s audience in mind. AI, machine learning, and with it chat bots are taking centre stage. Customer as well as user engagement needs to be in real time...
SAP acquires CallidusCloud – Take Two
The News SAP has recently announced the completion of the acquisition of Callidus Software, Inc. Unsurprisingly, CallidusCloud’s assets shall get consolidated under the umbrella of SAP Hybris leveraging the customer relationships that the existing leadership team, which shall continue to lead their team, has built. CallidusCloud is a leader in sales performance management and in the CPQ area and also has some more interesting assets, notably their contract lifecycle management offering, which ties nicely into the CPQ piece. The CPQ software has a (first) working integration into SAP’s Cloud for Sales, which got announced in September 2017 and that gets continuously improved. One seemingly simple, yet powerful feature of the CPQ software is the indicator for margin health that gets updated as a sales representative works upon a quote. The software’s ability to generate multi-level workflows based upon changes of prices or contract clauses creates an efficient workflow, which includes the customer when using the portal based delivery of documents during negotiations. All in all the software is geared towards making the sales process efficient. CallidusCloud’s solutions shall be sold standalone as well as integrated into SAP solutions and a roadmap shall get announced at SAPPHIRENOW in June 2018. I have done a brief initial analysis of this acquisition right after the plan got announced and followed up with some musings about how CPQ can be delivered in a customer experience fashion. The Bigger Picture With CallidusCloud’s CPQ SAP now has at minimum three configuration engines that can get used by customers: ERP Variant Configurator SAP Hybris CPQ CallidusCloud CPQ A fourth one comes into the picture if I...
Clari – Nipping at Salesforce’s Heels?
A brief while ago I had the chance of talking to Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, about how AI can help making sales organizations more effective and efficient. Clari is a vendor of Opportunity-to-Close solutions. G2Crowd lists the company amongst the leaders of its Sales Analytics Software quadrant, while Gartner Group in 2017 named it a cool vendor in the Tech Go-To-Market. Shortly after the conversation Clari announced the closure of a $35 Million funding round “following record growth”, essentially a tripling of their customer base while maintaining a near 100 per cent renewal rate. According to Andy, the company applies “machine learning focused on sales”, i.e. predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve pipeline visibility and to get more insight into which opportunities are more likely to close than others. This helps in focusing on these opportunities. This solution was developed after having in depth conversation with a number of big sales teams, figuring out their challenges/problems. As a result of this the company is addressing three problems. Many to most sales reps do not consider CRM systems (or SFA systems, for that matter) as particularly helpful. Sales managers do have a poor visibility into what their teams are doing, with which opportunities they spend their time. Executives and Sales Operations are dealing with “XLS hell” because the system’s forecasting ability is broken. All in all, points two and three are consequences of point one. If a system is not of help it is a time-waster and tends to be avoided. Data about opportunities will not be entered in a timely manner nor will it be very accurate. Clari’s...