SAP Strategy – Decyphered

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 27, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |

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...

SAP acquires CallidusCloud – Take Two

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 12, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |

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...

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...

Products to Services – The SAP Hybris Summit 2017

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 23, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

This year’s SAP Hybris Summit in Barcelona was attended by almost 3,000 paying participants, which is likely to make it the biggest ever, in spite of the recent unrest in Catalonia. It was packed with partners and presentations. The message all around was about subscription economy, how companies will need to transform themselves from product- to service companies, and how SAP supports this by delivering YaaS, networked solutions, IoT and machine learning, based upon the SAP Cloud platform. Owing not only to the topic of subscription economy GDPR was, of course, a topic, too. The key message here was: Our software helps you being compliant. With SAP Hybris standing not only for ecommerce but also for SAP’s new brand of CRM (oops, engagement) solutions, there was astonishingly little information about the Sales- and Service Clouds and only a few bits about the Marketing Cloud. The pending acquisition of Gigya was naturally out of scope, although Gigya as a partner featured in the show with a booth and presentations in the theaters. Day One Having said this, the first keynote, held by SAP Hybris president Carsten Thomas, was slightly underwhelming. It set the stage for the topic, but was essentially last year’s content. The narrative was all about how companies like Uber and Airbnb change the game for traditional companies, the impact of machine learning, and the importance of focusing on experiences (not even outcomes). In brief: nothing new, and only a fuzzy view on SAP Hybris’ strategy. It, however, was presented very well. The Q&A’s offered on day one added some more flesh to the topics, also on the...