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...
SAP acquires Gigya – A Snap Analysis from Down Under
The News Well, it is already more than two weeks ago that this news hit the wires, but SAP announced the acquisition of Gigya, a leading Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform vendor. Gigya got placed in the top position of Forrester’s Wave for Customer Identity and Access Management Platforms Q2 2017, a position that is owned by SAP, if the company manages to address customer (and hence analyst) concerns that arise from the merger. SAP, in turn, with its SAP Hybris branded software, provides a suite of commerce and engagement solutions that allow organizations to build and leverage in real time a 360 degree view on the customer, across channels and devices. Gigya is an SAP (Hybris) partner since 2013 or so, and has integrations with SAP Hybris Ecommerce, SAP Hybris Marketing and SAP CRM. SAP intends to make the Gigya platform part of its Hybris portfolio. The transaction is expected to be closed by end of 2017. The Bigger Picture The CIAM market is evolving fast, coming out of the area of providing social logins with the purpose of simplifying web site logins only a decade ago. This purpose remains but along with solving registration problems there are now a lot regulation challenges that are to be addressed. Just think, management of consent and preferences across sites, or GDPR, which imposes data residence requirements on top. With the additional data collection capabilities of CIAM solutions there is quite an upside for CRM vendors – especially for ones with strong marketing automation and profiling capabilities, like SAP. There is an increased ability to accurately address individual customers...
SAP CRM Into S/4HANA – Did SAP Hit Bulls Eye?
After having talked with Volker Hildebrand about the future of SAP CRM and whether or not there will be a CRM component in S/4HANA at CRM evolution 2017 I now had the chance to follow up with some folks back at SAP in Walldorf. A little Recap Volker told me that, unsurprisingly, SAP is working actively on adding CRM functionality into S/4HANA. In fact, they are merging SAP CRM into it. This is in my eyes meanwhile also the preferred of the two possible options; the other one would be marrying SAP Hybris C4C into S/4HANA. This is the approach which I originally preferred as it would lead to a cleaner code base. I changed my mind, putting customer friendliness reasons over technological cleanliness. The main advantages of merging SAP CRM into S4/HANA over SAP Hybris C4C are that this approach Opens a future roadmap for current SAP CRM customers that stretches beyond 2025. These customers else are at risk of defecting. Provides the continued chance for customers to run their SAP instance on-premise. According to Volker there are still a good number of customers that do not want to run their instance in the cloud. The key word here is choice. It simplifies the system landscape and its operation And this approach works, in spite of SAP seemingly having numerous studies that lay out in detail that SAP CRM could never work as part of an ERP. Now What is Going On? As said, SAP is merging SAP CRM into S/4HANA. This will not be a simple merge but CRM will become and Add On to S/HANA. This...