thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
SAPPHIRE 2018 – The Return of the Suite

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...
Products to Services – The SAP Hybris Summit 2017

Products to Services – The SAP Hybris Summit 2017

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...
AI and IoT at SAP – Yin and Yang

AI and IoT at SAP – Yin and Yang

During the 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW conference SAP told the stunned audience about how they connected some dots to create better value and more intelligent business applications for their customers. In essence SAP lifted the veil on how the company will go ahead with two technologies that will dominate the next years and that are ordinarily treated as different topics. But which, in essence, are like yin and yang. I talk about AI and machine learning on one hand, and IoT on the other. SAP has been fairly quiet on the former and fairly vocal on the latter, although the first announcement was about machine learning powered intelligent business applications, back in November 2016. At that time SAP announced the availability of the machine learning platform for SAPPHIRE NOW 2017. After this, SAP announced SAP Leonardo, the bundling of their IoT portfolio back in January 2017. On day 1 of SAPPHIRE NOW SAP delivered on the November promise by announcing “it’s time for machine learning to take the work out of your work flow. It’s time for billions of devices to go from thinking, to doing. It’s time for SAP Leonardo, the SAP system for digital innovation.’ With this approach they even go beyond only connecting two technologies but they also add Blockchain, Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics into one single platform. Whereas one could argue that Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics are essentially the same. With this powerful combination, as Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst of Constellation Research, aptly observed, ‘technology for the first time can do more than business best practices want’. To accommodate for this, SAP...