Microsoft and Adobe announce a WOW partnership
Today Microsoft and Adobe announced a deep strategic partnership. Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for their Marketing, Creative, and Document Clouds; Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Wow! That is a game changer in the CRM world. It takes the other tier one players, especially Salesforce, and Oracle, following their AI announcements, plus SugarCRM, head on. While I expect some AI driven marketing functionality being announced near term the initial benefit is a leading marketing tool being accessible for Microsoft. This partnership is also a blow to Oracles IaaS story as it drives load to Azure where Oracle seems to focus on their existing customer base. Well, and then there is AWS, too … And it should be highly beneficial for both companies. Not talking about the benefits of running on a powerful cloud platform Adobe with Cortana gets access to and likely will be integrated into a leading AI and machine learning platform. Conversely, the so far not too strong marketing functionality in Dynamics CRM gets a significant boost by getting integrated with one of the hottest marketing clouds that are around at the moment. The synergies that can be generated by tightly integrating a powerful real time analytics and AI platform, powerful productivity applications, and a strong marketing platform can hardly be overestimated. This is very good news for Microsoft Dynamics customers once the systems actually are running on a harmonized data model. Till then the prospects are highly exciting. As a result, as per the announcement, customers will be able...
How to move SAP and Customers Beyond CRM
After my SAP CRM State of the Nation and Light at the End of the Tunnel articles of earlier this year it is time again to have a look at what and how SAP is doing in the wider CRM arena. After all SAP also recently released its 1608 Hybris version, which in my eyes makes SAP very competitive again. Let’s start with some facts, which I’d like to put into a bigger context: SAP CRM 7.0 is in mainstream maintenance until end of 2025. This should give some relief to the existing customer base SAP CRM (the on premise product) continues to receive only little investment; on the positive side this investment is very customer driven At the same time CRM 7.0 is the only version that is not in customer specific maintenance; means it is the only version that still gets legal/regulatory and other updates SAP’s CRM strategy ‘Beyond CRM’ has a strong focus on the Hybris line of products, which, I think, meanwhile is highly competitive As an aside to the above points this situation makes the maintenance fee of 22 per cent for SAP CRM in combination with the suboptimal support appear very high The user interface of the Hybris line of products is a lot sleeker than the UI of CRM 7.0 From a functionality point of view, especially looking into industry specific functionalities, CRM 7.0 still has an edge over the Hybris portfolio, with the possible exceptions of Retail as an industry and Hybris Marketing. S/4HANA is getting pretty successful – this may be taken as conjecture, but people I trust confirm this;...
Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis
Back in June most of us got surprised by the news that Microsoft has acquired LinkedIn. Neither of us deemed this a bad move from a company point of view. There ae just too many potential synergies between MS Dynamics CRM, Office365, Azure on one side and LinkedIn, as the leading business network on the other. At that time many of us, including myself, were musing about when Twitter will be acquired, and by who. #MSFT acquired #LinkedIn – Twitter now the last source of global personal #data. Is it up for grabs? Who would buy? #AAPL? #Google? — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 thinking of it – @SAP might find Twitter a good match, looking at their recent offerings #bigdata #AI #analytics https://t.co/sgUpcLgRBK — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 My initial guesses have been Apple or Google, then suggesting SAP to have a look into it. Thinking of it I could have added Oracle, IBM and Salesforce or media companies including telcos into the mix. In brief, a lot of companies should be interested in the treasure pit of data, behavioral data, that Twitter holds. Why? There are multiple reasons. Twitter is the last remaining independent social media outside Facebook and the big Chinese ones that the big western companies will not get access to; Tencent, Alibaba, Momo, etc. are rather buying it themselves than being for sale (to a western company), Facebook doesn’t need to. Twitter has a profitability and growth challenge, but an interesting technology and, importantly, is a great source of real time information about a lot of topics, from business to consumer....