Customer Experience is a Platform Play – Always Was

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 7, 2018 | Blog |

The most important tool that enterprise software vendors have in their respective arsenals is their platform. While Vinnie Mirchandani rightfully states that Enterprise Software Platforms have so far underwhelmed, Denis Pombriant proclaims them the new battleground. In my opinion it is not that new a battleground but as part of the Clash of Titans it is becoming more evident as a battleground. An enterprise software platform was always part of the battle for dominance in the customer engagement – or putting it into (marketing) industry lingo – customer experience market. It is actually an integral part of it. This is largely because of the ongoing commoditization of transactional business applications. But it was sexier to talk about shiny topics like engagement and experience than to talk about the grease and the machinery behind that drives and enables the technical delivery of engagements – note, that there are systems of engagement, but there is nothing like a system of experience. And now topics like chatbots, machine learning, AI, ambient computing, IoT, to name a few, made the machinery – the platform – the new black. A – perhaps not so – brief history When looking at the broad topic of CRM, customer engagement or customer experience, we have seen a lot of change happening since the early days of Sales Force Automation, SFA. Back in the early 90s one of the first topics has been SFA, with a focus on making a distributed sales force more effective and efficient. Contact management came even earlier, call center software and field service quickly followed. The emerging industry was dominated by little players...

SAP and Microsoft bring their Partnership to the Next Level

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 4, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On November 27 SAP and Microsoft announced a new level of their strategic partnership. Their key messages are that S/4 is fully ready to run on Azure Microsoft is committed to SAP and will upgrade its internal financial systems to S/4 on Azure SAP will move a dozen (unspecified) “key internal business critical systems” to Azure SAP and Microsoft will “co-engineer, go to market together with premier solutions and provide joint support services to ensure the best cloud experience for customers” SAP and Microsoft will both provide documentation about their internal projects “to provide customers with guidance and enterprise architecture for deployment of SAP applications on Azure” Of course it is not much of a surprise to SAP “connoisseurs” that SAP is not running its business on just one instance of their own S/4 systems – still, twelve is a fairly sizeable number to migrate to Azure. It is also not much of a surprise that Microsoft is an important and committed SAP ECC customer. As such Microsoft, of course, has plans to upgrade to S/4. All in all this is the long due follow-up announcement to the 2016 SAP and Microsoft announcement of “empowering organizations to advance their digital transformation”. Back in the day I wrote that this announcement shows a lot of potential for the customer and that Microsoft likely will have more advantages to Microsoft than for SAP. In 2016 the announcement was also about Fiori. There is no word about it anymore today. As an interesting aside, Microsoft announced that it will use Azure AI (Cortana) and it’s analysis services for “more efficient...

Oracle Ups The Ante – Does the Salesforce Empire Strike Back?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 28, 2017 | Blog |

The fall conference season is in full swing. Of the big 4 we had Oracle Open World and the SAP Hybris Summit, with the Salesforce Dreamforce, SAPPHIRE, and Microsoft Connect() still to come. I have covered the SAP Hybris Summit, so do not need to say much about it anymore. The event was short on great announcements – maybe they will come at SAPPHIRE – but certainly contributed to showing the clear vision forward that SAP has. And it is a compelling and consistent vision. OOW 17 was a different beast, most notably with the announcement of Oracle 18c. A year ago Oracle took Amazon full on, declaring it enemy number 1. Many analysts, including myself, were confused about this. Why Amazon and not Microsoft? After all Microsoft is the company that has a very credible IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Add the operating system and productivity software and you have a company with a formidable software stack that can be on the winning side of a Clash of Titans. While CTO Larry Ellison still took pot shots at Amazon in his keynotes, one can come to the conclusion that these are a kind of diversion, and that Oracle is back in best Musashi style. Oracle steps up its IaaS game The AI driven automation of Oracle 18c is game changing in the database play, and hence in IaaS. The new container engines should bring Oracle’s cloud on par with AWS and Azure. All three, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP now have something to chew upon. SAP, because their databases are now lacking a real important argument. And that has an...

More Nimble News

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 14, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

The News In the past 5 weeks or so, there have been quite a few news items about Nimble, with the biggest product news dated September 28 and the most interesting business development dated October 11. The headlines include Nimble’s deeper collaboration with Microsoft and its channel partners, as well as product innovations intended to increase the value delivered to Office 365- and G Suite users. In particular, Nimble: Now integrates with Circleback, an AI-powered contact capture and cleaning tool as well as their business card scanner. Nimble is now able to extract high quality contact information from email signatures and to add it to the Nimble contact record. This way it becomes easier to keep contact information current. Has partnered with NeoCloud. NeoCloud is a managed cloud services company that deploys and manages Office 365. The company now bundles Nimble into all its Office 365 deals and thus offers business applications on top of its infrastructure- and productivity-focused solutions. This is based on the (valid) assumption that Office 365 users benefit from having a simple and powerful contact management platform that resides on top of the productivity suite. Has become selected by Microsoft to join its Seattle Accelerator program. On the product front released Nimble Prospector, a ‘powerful email/phone and address discovery engine that enables Nimble users to build outbound prospects’. According to Jon, prospector draws upon dozens of sources (not LinkedIn, so much he volunteered) to deliver contact information based on a company or domain name. Nimble also introduced an Add-In for Outlook on Android and, not surprisingly, support for Microsoft’s Edge Nimble also continues to pursue...

Nimble News from Microsoft Inspire

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 22, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |

MS Inspire, the annual Microsoft partner event, has just ended, wrapping up a flurry of news and announcements from Microsoft and its channel partners. Most announcements were interesting; some more than others, especially when considering these items together. I’ve been following Nimble CRM and its founder Jon Ferrara for a while now, so I was particularly interested in hearing about the launch of its global reseller program and its social relationships insights add-in for Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook Desktop/Mobile. Nimble made its announcements within the context of Microsoft’s increasing its emphasis on partner success, as evinced by its One Commercial Partner initiative to bring together partner-focused teams from across the company and its new ISV Cloud Embed services offerings for partners. Why is this interesting? Microsoft’s lifeblood is its partner ecosystem.  In all likelihood, the company has the biggest, most robust partner channel around. Microsoft basically sets, and resets, the gold standard with their constantly evolving partner strategies. A case in point is Microsoft’s announcement to incentivize its partner-focused teams to sell   3rd party partner solutions with Microsoft first party solutions, Microsoft is making it even easier for MSP/CSV and ISV partners to leverage synergies and add value to customers, profits to partners and stickiness to Microsoft products. We also see Microsoft’s Azure co-sell program taking further steps with ISV Cloud Embed. This new program allows partners to embed Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, and Microsoft Flow into their front- and back-office solutions. (I wouldn’t be surprised if LinkedIn were also integrated into this mix in the near future). If you think about it, this co-sell program...