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...
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...