SAP Strategy – Decyphered
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
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...
Salesforce acquires MuleSoft – A Defensive Move
The News On March 20, 2018 Salesforce announced the signature of a definitive agreement to acquire Mulesoft for a whopping 6.5 billion USD – whopping because the 2017 Mulesoft revenues have been at just $296.5 Million, albeit with a $1 billion target for 2021. The press release states that “together, Salesforce and MuleSoft will accelerate customers’ digital transformations, enabling them to unlock data across legacy systems, cloud apps, and devices to make smarter, faster decisions and create highly differentiated, connected, customer experiences.” Mulesoft is recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2017 Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service Quadrant. The Bigger Picture As I have stated repeatedly before, most recently here, the enterprise software market is engaged in something that can be called a platform war. There are a few big players and some emergent players in the enterprise software market, and then we have a number of companies that come from the infrastructure side of the house. Business applications get commoditized. Therefore the platform becomes crucial in a battle for dominance. And it is not a given that there will be a dominance. Looking at the 4 big software vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP, they all have different legacies, strengths and weaknesses. They share one weakness, which is that their core business is in a mainly saturated enterprise market. All of them want and need to play their strengths, while mitigating their weaknesses in order to become the dominant player. Looking at Salesforce, one of its key strengths is the brand. Right or wrong, pretty much the first name that comes to mind when thinking CRM...