After having covered some press releases about new releases and commenting some interesting organizational changes it is time to have a look at another topic – the need for consistency in a suite of cloud products. Consistency not only in the most obvious part of a family of products and solutions – the user interface – but the more important aspect of consistency, namely the data model. If you wonder how this relates to customer experience I invite you to read on. This post is actually spurred by a brief conversation that I had with Jon Reed of Diginomica about this very topic during one of the recent CRM Playaz episodes. Btw, if you do not yet listen in to the LinkedIn conversations of CRM Playaz Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, discussing important developments and current events in the world of CRM – then you should. Really! But I digress. Back to the topic. The question is about whether it is necessary to have a unique data model or not. And this question might be answered differently, based upon the definition of ‘data model’. There is no doubt that a unique data model across applications is very helpful, actually a necessity. Where there is doubt, is whether this data model needs to be defined on database level or not in order to be really helpful. My point of view is that it does not need to be defined on database level. This point of view might be contradicting some ‘common sense’ wisdom and the strategy that some very successful companies are pursuing, including Oracle – as it seems – and Zoho. In the good old days before the advent of the  ‘New Dimension’ products, SAP had one, too. On top of it sat R/3. Just to be sure: Having a common ‘data model’ across applications is a huge advantage. There is no doubt about this. But let’s dig into the two main possibilities on how to achieve and implement one. One possibility is to model and fix it on database level. To define and model it in a way that every attribute and relation has its one-to-one representation on the database. This model most certainly has some advantages. It offers one consistent and unique model of describing what is important for and about organizations and (business) transactions. It gives utmost control and precision about semantics and it makes it very easy to understand what a business concept is about. It is also performing well – if not normalized too far. This is the winning model, if it is correct and thought through – and can be kept stable. As I said above, it is the concept that Oracle and Zoho are pursuing. And I am not the one to say that either of these example companies has not thought through this approach of defining and implementing an enterprise data model. In fact I am very sure that they did! And they did even more. They did something that other companies, including SAP, and as far as I see, Salesforce, omitted to do for too long after the cloud and therefore silo’ed solutions emerged. The advantage of cloud solutions and best-of-breed solutions is that they focus on solving few problems, but these very well; and the customers without the necessity to buy much functionality they neither want nor need, get just what they want. However, with this comes a challenge, the challenge of diverging data models. Each of the applications, even within the same family of cloud applications, often has different data models. This is due to the fact that they are optimized for different tasks, so can be viewed as being quite natural. Just that it isn’t. It is the easy way. And it doesn’t work in a platform economy. Not at all. As I have written before, a platform constitutes of four pillars:

• The technology platform
• Tools that enable and provide insight
• Productivity tools
• And an ecosystem

The latter three pillars suffer, if the former does not provide for a unique, yet extensible, data model with well-defined semantics If the latter three suffer, so will business applications built on top of the platform. As ecosystem players provide own applications and extensions to existing applications, it is necessary to have a common language that describes how business entities look like, how they relate to each other and how they are governed. In times of make or buy decisions frequently being decided towards buy the right way to go is to offer a business meta data model that fulfils three main conditions:

• It provides a definition of the main business objects from a business point of view.
• It is extensible.
• It allows for centralized maintenance across applications within an ecosystem.

Now, it should be documented as well, but that is another story … At SAP, in ancient times sincerely, this was a job done by the data dictionary (minus the documentation); partly done, to be honest. The data dictionary was an abstraction of the physical data model to describe business entities. Just that it was more geared towards abstracting from the database, as opposed to defining a business language. There are different ways to implement this business meta data model in a cloud first world. Microsoft developed the common data model, which enables no- and low code development across its ecosystem. Also providing the development tools and its own environments, Microsoft is essentially leading the pack. Salesforce promotes its own Canonical Data Model with industry flavors. Salesforce’s challenge is that it is a CRM company and not covering the full value chain. And there is another one, which I’ll mention a bit later. Zoho has gone forward similarly, staying in full control of their own destiny by not having acquired a single vendor so far (which makes up for an admirable strategy and success story). The company builds its apps around the concept of what they call data pillars, which are controlled by some apps that act as a database. Other apps use this database. Within its ecosystem these apps can be enhanced by means that stretch from no-code to professional coding. One of Zoho’s challenges is that the ecosystem still needs to get strengthened to be really on an eye-to-eye level with the big four. SAP is currently working on SAP Graph, which is a wrapper around the APIs of SAP’s existing products, creating a harmonized, business oriented API layer that can and should be used by application developers. They are coming bit late, but with a good and important approach. Additionally, SAP is working on SCP based micro services that manage the access and usage of business objects across applications. Done right these services could also have the ability to extend the business objects of the underlying and connected applications. One challenge is to keep these services in synch with SAP Graph. Ideally they are the same. The combination of SAP Graph and the micro services can be a real winner if the services do not only allow the management of data access but also the customer/partner specific extension of the data model and with it the corresponding web services. It cannot be overestimated: With the help of a common data model and semantics customers, vendors and partners can easily and consistently extend application families to serve their customers and users. This is the foundation for any attempt at providing positive and lasting experiences. On top of their own models, and jointly, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, together with a growing number of additional partners, are working on the Open Data Initiative ODI, which is ‘a common data model, and a common data lake’ that helps avoiding data silos and their integration. Having this data lake, based upon a well-defined semantics, and a well-defined API as given by a single data model across all applications of an ecosystem, is what enables the creation of engagements that can result in memorable experiences. Everything, and I mean everything, that creates insight and enables corresponding action powering engagements and experiences, depends on a data model like this. The power of ODI cannot be underestimated. The strength of ODI lies in its being cross ecosystem as it spawns across at least two major ones, therefore bringing the concept of a unified data model to a whole new level. Its weakness lies in not covering some more important ecosystems. But then this post is not about deficiencies of an initiative. It is about the importance of having and offering a joint data model and API for ecosystems. The importance of this cannot be underestimated as well. And decision makers need to have a hard look at where platforms are moving with regards to this topic.  

It has been a while since I last mused about things S/4HANA and C/4HANA (or Customer Experience Suite) at SAP. So, it is time to have a look at what happened since. Last year I concluded that “the differentiation between the old world transactional systems and the systems of engagement is more and more being sorted out” and that the “modularization of the various clouds into ‘Micro’-Services would allow for a seamless recombination of systems that allow for the definition of functional scope according to customer needs as opposed to only offering pre-packaged systems”. Has there been any change, since? Let’s go along the questions that I asked in my previous post.

• How reliable is the roadmap, or rather, are the roadmaps? At the end of the day there is the eternal dilemma between flexibility and stability.
• How to go ahead with multiple back end systems?
• How are engines and industry solutions dealt with?
• How is the differentiation between S4 including customer management and the C4 offerings?

All these questions continue to be relevant, as they are touching the core of SAP’s strategy. What is the current answer to them? Let me give my take on them, as I see it evolving. Just to be sure, this is my observation and me listening to customers, not an official word of SAP. Just my interpretation. After all I am not on the distribution list of SAP’s internal strategy discussions. Being a CRM guy and a suite guy, for me the last question is the elephant in the room. The answer to where SAP sees the boundary between S4 and C4 is absolutely crucial to customers and partners alike. There simply should not be too much grey space here. Lets tackle this one last … as the sequence of bullets suggests. So, let’s start from the beginning. Some answers, and well, some recommendations.

Roadmaps …

… are just that, roadmaps: Plans that are based on information available and priorities at a certain point in time. They exist to provide guidance to customers. Of course, priorities can change and customers with enough negotiation power can ask for an adaptation. As a consequence, what has been too rigid in the good ole times of on premise software with release cycles of 12 months or more, has become very flexible. This basically means that customers will not receive any strongly worded answer – let alone a promise – about high level functionality that extends the current release in work. Even that one has a big disclaimer. On one hand, this approach appropriately answers customer demand for flexibility and being able to influence releases with a near term impact. On the other hand, this flexibility deprives SAP and its customers of longer term stability in the roadmap. Having said that, and considering the roadmaps that I mainly look at, SAP is quite consistent. Of course the longer the outlook is the more the variance is, but in general the next two releases seem to be pretty steady – although sources tell me that detailed planning is done only for the next upcoming release. I am sure that SAP is fixing a good part of the development portfolio of upcoming releases. If not, the recommendation would be to do, to balance out strategic and customer necessities. Of course, if roadmap promises are given to customers, these need to be honoured, too. And if promises are given, priorities are changed, then the published roadmap should be adapted – as it it needs to be after each release, when a promise has become reality. I know that this is a hard balancing act, but it is one that a world class portfolio management of a world class company can shine with.

Multiple Back Ends

This is the same as before. CRM Middleware is still a part of the package. Different systems can communicate via it. And then there is the SCP. I still need to validate it, but connecting via CRM Middleware seems to be a good way to keep customer data in synch while offering wide ranging sales and service functionalities. All in all there is not much change since last year. There needs to be a leading system for each real world entity, and landscape complexity needs to stay in check doing so. Multiple back end stays complex. Especially so, when order taking and/quotation management via C4 comes into the picture. Especially more complex scenarios like support of variant configuration are difficult. Variant configuration in particular, an SAP strength, needs the Configuration and Pricing Service – CPS – that resides in the SCP. Now, this service can connect to only one ERP, and there is no infrastructure yet to support multiple back ends, even if data and number ranges are harmonized between them. So, again, while things are improving there is still some way to go. And in this particular example I do know two things: It is necessary as many customers are having a multiple backend scenario and second, SAP is very interested in and actively working on improving the situation here. There is a technical and a commercial challenge here: Technically CPS is single tenant, i.e. can support only one single backend. Which is a good start and SAP is thinking of how to feasibly improve this. And there are some very smart people who know their stuff working on it. So, check here! Then there is a commercial challenge. SAP customers pay for CPQ. This tool is powerful, offers a lot of value, especially integrated into a landscape. So, given its value, customers will arrive at a fair price. Customers also pay for variant configuration in ERP. The same argument as before applies. But then they also need to pay (handsomely) for the CPS, which resides in the SAP Cloud Platform, SCP – another entity that is paid for. I acknowledge that CPS has been a piece of work but I think it is worthwhile considering to deliver it free of charge as part of the solution. This would appear so much better.

Engines and Industry solutions

Another sore point. Well, actually two of them. But points that I will treat only shortly. Industry solutions can only be appropriately addressed after enough of the horizonal functionality is available. Now, this seems to be largely the case in both, S4 as well as C4. This is indicated by SAP showing an increasing focus on industry solutions, especially in the S4 area. Is SAP there yet? Not by a wide margin, compared to ECC 6. But then ECC 6 has a few years of advantage. Engines are a similar topic. Many of them have been coded into existing applications. Those, that have been made part of CRM like e.g. TPM or loyalty management are a challenge that needs to get addressed (TPM) or already are in process of being addressed (loyalty management). Others are too deeply ingrained into the ERP system (solution configuration? Condition technique?) and too heavily used to be morphed into standalone engines. Existing customers create a factual basis here. All in all, I do see work in progress, but work that might need to be sped up in order to fend off the competition.

S4 vs. C4

Where does S4 end and C4 start? This is the 1,000 dollar question. The official SAP answer is that whatever is transactional is in S4 and whatever is customer facing is in C4. If it is customer experience, then it is C4 (which is likely not a perfect decision criteria). Marketing is completely in C4. This answer still leaves a lot of grey space as there is considerable overlap between ‘transactional’ and ‘customer facing’. Order taking can happen in both systems. S/4 has the original CIC and now the SAP Contact Center 365 that runs on top of it; C/4 has a service center. Even worse, if you ask S4 guys or C4 guys, you still get non matching answers. On one hand, C4 is strategic. This is also evidenced by the fact that for the first time ever these days SAP shows CRM – or rather customer experience – related software revenues. On the other hand S/4 is strategic. And there are plenty of SAP CRM customers who are deeply invested into this software. And reputation or no, SAP CRM is a good and powerful solution. So, although SAP investment into the CM part of SAP is significantly lower than the investment into C/4, it is a straightforward and very good idea to deliver Customer Management (CM, formerly known as CRM Add On) as part of the S/4 license. For more than one reason Which is exactly what SAP has just done. You are asking what other reasons are? Well, how about these two:

• SAP has plenty of ERP and CRM customers who need some kind of sales and service solution and who do not need as much as C/4 offers. Still, they do want to (or need to) migrate to S/4. With CM as part of S/4 these customers get a powerful sales and service solution without the immediate need of buying another solution. These existing customers can take advantage of the package while having the additional benefit of not needing to maintain a middleware as CM is an integral part of S/4. According to SAP the investments into customizing and custom code can be reused to an extent of more than 90 per cent. This is real value.

All that at no additional cost and probably even at a lower license fee as customers do not need SAP CRM anymore. On top of this, the necessary knowledge is already available.

• There are also many new customers with either another CRM product or none at all (yeah, these still exist). Both groups can benefit from using the CRM that is built in to S/4; for similar reasons as the first group: There is a good CRM and integrated solution available ‘for free’ that just needs to get used.

In conclusion

SAP works hard to improve on these topics. Let me try to formulate three praises and three recommendations for further improvement. As it is no good style to end with criticism, even constructive one, I start with some recommendations.

• It should be interesting to improve on the solution thought again. Take the example of variant configuration. There are too many pricing entities and, well, too many product groups that one needs to talk to, if things are getting serious. Customers do variant configuration. They do it in a sales system. Try to harmonize responsibilities around this, using a one face to the customer approach. This could facilitate things for you and your customers.
• The boundary between S4 and C4 needs to be clarified. Currently it is not and there is a lot of confusion in the market. Customers need more guidance. They are first looking at their implementation partners – who need guidance, too – and then at SAP. So, please sharpen the picture, that is pretty blurred here.
• SAP has a lot of engines. That is great. Somehow many of them are built into applications, which is not so great. Think TPM. Think loyatlty management. Think configuration. There are many more examples of functionalities that can be better exposed as engines, offering advantages for customers and hence for SAP

Now, let me finish with some great points that I see

• It is a fantastic move to offer CM as part of S4. This offers lots of benefit to existing as well as new customers – and therefore to SAP.
• SAP shows quite some customer orientation when it comes to improving the C4 suite. I have only limited examples but these are very laudable and encouraging. More of this can change images
• I think that SAP does a good job at communicating roadmaps. Yes, it can get improved, but overall, continue on this path

Overall SAP is on a good way, perhaps not the one that is perfect for every customer, but it is. Final recommendation: Show it. Learn some lessons from the competition, adopt them to match them also in the impressions department.

The News

On May 21, 2018 Adobe announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce. The obvious objective of Adobe is to integrate Magento’s commerce capabilities into their own experience capabilities. According to Brad Rencher, executive VP and general manger, Digital experience, with this acquisition Adobe is the “only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey”. Magento Commerce (Magento) is a ”leading provider of cloud commerce” software to merchants and brands. Magento covers both, B2C and B2B vendors. The company is listed as a strong performer for both, b2b- and b2c ecommerce solutions in this year’s Forrester Waves on Commerce Suites.

The Bigger Picture

Adobe is all about ‘delivering experience’. You should read the second part of friend Paul Greenberg’s recent ZDNet article on Adobe where he explains customer experience, brand experience, and consumable experiences – and where he sees Adobe in this triple – in his uniquely great fashion. A marketing suite like Adobe’s Experience Cloud needs channels into which the insights, that the marketing solution generates, are pushed. The most important one being e-commerce. E-commerce is also the channel that offers most potential. The technology is no more bound to just a commerce web site. The site is just one possible interface. As is a chat bot in Facebook Messenger. As is Alexa. Or Siri. Or Google Assistant. You get the picture. Further, an e-commerce site is not only the foremost channel to send marketing communications to (and to deliver experiences), but also one of the most important input channels for information that enables the delivery of an experience. With this, Adobe can now offer a closed loop scenario using own means instead of relying on partnerships. While Magento has a reputation as an open source platform, which implies focusing on SMBs, it actually has quite some Enterprise Customers. The company seems to focus on the larger end of companies. After all, this is where the money lies. With Magento, one of the few remaining players with credible ambitions and a record in the enterprise market went off the plate. And this has some implications for all players, customers, as well as competitors (and strategic partners). The remaining ones seem to be Intershop, Apttus, Insite, maybe Digital River – and possibly Shopify.

My PoV and Advice

Brad Rencher is mostly right with his broad statement, insofar he maintains the complete enumeration of topics – and has an audience with the right notion of ‘experience’ (again, I strongly recommend reading Paul’s article). But Adobe is not exactly the company (yet) that is able to deliver a complete picture of customer experience. There is no serious marketing without at least one (preferably more) strong communications channels. With the capabilities of Magento, Adobe takes a big step out of the pure marketing area. This acquisition is a great move that surely heats up the competition in the enterprise market. Where analysts (including myself) added Adobe into the Clash of Titans as the .5 next to the big 4 Adobe now emphasizes on being treated as an eye-to-eye competitor in the wider CRM space. This is, because a CRM offering cannot be complete if there is no e-commerce channel part of it. And referring to partner solutions in this critical area just doesn’t cut the mustard, especially if one is competing in the high end (hello, Microsoft?). Additionally, this merger offers the possibility of reviving Adobe’s open source and community roots. There are three main pieces of advice.

One for Adobe and Magento customers

I do not think that there is a need to be concerned about ongoing Magento support. Look out for a Magento roadmap and an integration roadmap, and inquire about plans for CRM beyond e-commerce and marketing. Being able to support omni-channel marketing and omni-channel commerce is one thing. Becoming a full stack provider is a totally different ball game, especially if not only enterprises shall get addressed.

One for SAP, Salesforce, and Oracle

Observe and learn. Adobe has the leading experience suite and now owns a leading e-commerce solution along with a huge eco system. This also makes integration between different parts of the own solutions crucial. It must work seamlessly and be dead simple to achieve. Secondly, together with the customer service module of Magento the company is getting closer to offering a full featured CRM. Using the various Magento editions Adobe also can make a credible step into the SMB market. Scaling down is difficult, but this ability now becomes even more important.

One for Microsoft

Adobe is an important strategic partner for Microsoft, with Adobe being the preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365. With this acquisition Adobe becomes an even better fit, but gained some more independence from Microsoft. Microsoft itself only recently delivered an own marketing solution that is targeted towards SMBs, which may grow over time. Microsoft also does not own an e-commerce stack. Adobe now does. With a market capitalization of around $ 120B Adobe is probably too expensive to be acquired but the value that Adobe can offer to Microsoft is significant. So, keep this partnership as intensive as possible.

And a Bonus One for Adobe

The Adobe Experience Cloud is a great product, which can deliver a lot of value. It, however, has a pretty significant price tag, which causes a barrier, especially when looking at more and more saturation in the enterprise market and a MarTech landscape that lists almost 7,000 companies and growing (fast). The acquisition of Magento offers the possibility to strengthen the footprint in the mid sized business market, which still has tremendous potential, especially since the big 4 are struggling to penetrate this market, too. The risk of not extending the view to this market is being pushed upwards and then out of the market.

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

2025. Opens a future roadmap for current SAP CRM customers that stretches beyond 2025. These customers else are at risk of defecting.
2026. 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.
2027. 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 in itself is an interesting move, because this way it is not possible to continue using an existing SAP CRM in a standalone fashion. And there are some customers running SAP CRM without an ERP integration. I am still curious about the licensing impacts of this move. Some customers might not even have an SAP ERP, others might be too conservative to move on from SAP ERP to S/4HANA.

2017 – The Year of Service Functionality

The roadmap shows that SAP will start with delivering service functionality as part of this CRM add on, which makes sense as S/4HANA is sorely missing customer service as of now. This functionality shall have an RTC early 2018 based upon the S/4HANA 1709 release. While mainly relying on S/4HANA master data objects, as part of this S/4HANA will also benefit from the much stronger business partner that SAP CRM has, compared to ERP and the current S/4HANA. There is some reluctance to commit to a precise scope at this time, just that it will be core service functionality mainly targeting shared services and utilities industries. As it seems there will not be major migration tools with this first release.

2018 will be the Year of Sales Functionality

2018 then is dedicated to delivering core sales functionality. Here we will again see a strong use of S/4HANA objects, with the exception of the flexible organizational model that CRM brings with it and a good number of CRM related objects that S/4HANA just doesn’t have, like leads, opportunities, territory, loyalty, to name but a few. Order, configuration, pricing, and billing will be delivered by the S/4HANA core in a move that, at the outset, makes sense. This year will also see the development of migration tools.

Is 2019 the Year of Marketing?

In brief: No. After the release of the sales core 2019 will see a focus on rounding off the sales and service functionality and the addition of loyalty management. And with SAP Hybris Marketing SAP already has a marketing solution that can be used on premise and on demand.

How is SAP Doing It?

SAP is looking at the individual business objects and deciding individually which object to use, and how. Objects will get harmonized in order to avoid costly redundancies and to avoid CRM Middleware – which will remain, by the way. Especially the highly normalized one-order model will get denormalized, using the existing index tables that got introduced to get some performance into the CRM Order model. This will also benefit the HANA DB which strongly prefers wide tables over joins. I am not fully clear about what that means when putting the S/4HANA order into the mix, though.

But What about the UI?

S/4HANA uses a Fiori UI. SAP CRM doesn’t. However, it is possible to make the CRM Web UI look similar to a Fiori UI. This will be augmented by delivering Fiori apps for overview pages and some selected native Fiori apps along with Fiori Launch Pad integration. I imagine this being similar to the current UI on SAP Hybris Marketing.

My Take

As said before I think that it is a good move to merge SAP CRM into S/4HANA. The sequence of objects for this mere also makes perfect sense although some customers would likely prefer a wider footprint right from the beginning. On the other hand there is no real pressure for them to migrate now. SAP continues support through 2025 and it is a good idea to continue benefitting from the stabilizing effect that the customer driven innovation strategy has and to wait until migration tools are there and working. And companies that are contemplating to move to S/4HANA need to complete this migration first, anyways. Harmonizing the data models obviously means that a migration from SAP CRM to ‘S/4CRM’ is a migration project, for which a stable S/4HANA is a precondition. What stays a concern for me is the positioning of ‘S/4CRM’ versus the SAP Hybris set of cloud solutions. There is a significant overlap in functionality. The messaging of when SAP recommends which solution really needs to be worked upon in order to avoid confusion. Grey zones must become minimal. The answer seems to be there for Marketing, where there is only one solution going forward. But how about loyalty management (exists in CRM and as a cloud version), trade promotion management (exists only in CRM), retail execution (is mainly a cloud solution), or configuration and pricing? S/4HANA has the latter two and with the SAP Hybris Revenue Cloud there is another entry (although belated) into the CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) market. An approach for solving this lies in distinguishing between systems of record and systems of engagement where slow-changing, mature functionality is concentrated in the S/4 world and faster moving engagement functionality is encapsulated in engines that could get deployed on site and on premise – or only be used on demand. Coupling systems of record and systems of engagement then could happen via micro services, but should happen on a platform- rather than application level to accommodate for machine learning abilities.

A while ago I had the pleasure of talking with Austin Willms who took me through a tour presenting GreenRope, a CRM solution for small businesses that offers three ‘suites’ of functionality across ales, marketing, and operations. The operations suite probably needs a bit of explanation but is essentially the customer service portion plus functionality covering project- and event management, knowledge management, a wiki, collaboration and – important – the majority of contact management functionality. The Sales suite covers workflows, activities, leads, and contact handling and the marketing suite provides marketers with the tools they need to do their job. ‘Their job’ mainly being e-mail- and website-marketing, with some social media marketing added to it. This is something that GreenRope is particularly well geared for. The software has its origins as an e-mail marketing tool that evolved into a business suite of CRM-related tools that supports additional customer requirements. The objective behind it is to provide as many tools as possible in very affordable packages, while being able to support a nearly unlimited number of contacts. GreenRope has customers that run the solution for millions of contacts in their database. The philosophy behind GreenRope is that it shall make people effective, by allowing them to organize easily and efficiently. It is not necessarily there to serve as an immediately revenue generating tool. There is no preferred industry for GreenRope, although its ability to deal with millions of contacts shows a B2C affinity. This making it easy for users philosophy is also exhibited by GreenRope regularly sending mails that help in the onboarding process and the easily accessible and very performing help, which not only includes help pages but also cheat sheets, videos, webinars, etc. Perhaps the two most powerful tools/functionalities within GreenRope are the automation and the groups. A group is the first level of contact organization. It is a very powerful concept, that however requires a bit of thinking – because it is so powerful. Every contact belongs to at least one group. Groups allow setting access permissions and can be used for custom content or fields. A group also acts as a filter to allow for viewing of customers in different stages and a kind of segment or target group for campaigns or workflows, including group specific web sites or landing pages. It can also be used to assign a customer to another GreenRope user. I wouldn’t be surprised if the group concept also lies behind GreenRopes separation of their own customers’ data. The internal automation tools offer a simple way of creating pretty powerful workflows and, well, automations. Building e.g. a to-do list or action items is extremely simple. Based upon an event it just takes a few clicks to create an action item for a sales rep to call a new lead. Multi stage campaigns and drip campaigns can get created easily simple using the Journey tool, Workflow Manager, and Drip Campaign tool. The Journey tool is a way of modeling a customer journey through a purchasing process. It offers four simple, yet powerful objects: A decision, which essentially is an if-then-else block, actions, which true to the focus on e-mail offer the sending of e-mails, the execution of a workflow, and the adding and removing of an object to or from a group. This, e.g., allows for advancing a customer through the sales stages. Additionally there is a delay that can get used to model delays for actions and a stop element to mark an end to a journey. Interestingly there is a conversion analysis and prediction module, which I couldn’t review lacking data. It is intended to predict factors that drive conversions using web site tracking. I assume that it doesn’t allow for personalization and identification of customers but still should do the most imminent job: Giving insight into what helps and detracts from successfully converting a prospect to a customer.

My Take

GreenRope is an ‘all-in-one’ CRM system that consists of a lot of tools that are molded together to build something that is complete in itself, given its strong focus on website- and e-mail marketing. I like the modular build of the solution and the clean UI. Main competitors, as the GreenRope team sees it for themselves are Infusionsoft, Hubspot, and Salesforce, although the all-in-one market is considerably bigger. This is a very strong and renowned group of competitors. One of the challenges that GreenRope faces when looking at Hubspot and Salesforce is that those two vendors have a far higher brand recognition, a wider ecosystem and at least in Salesforce’s case, also more capabilities. GreenRope to some extent reminds me of helpshift; both are hidden gems that deserve more of the spotlight than they get.

On Mach 8, 2017, SAP and Google announced another marriage in the cloud during Google’s Cloud Next event: SAP HANA is certified on Google’s Cloud Platform GCP, and is generally available now. SAP Cloud Platform and more products and solutions are to follow. The Google Cloud Launcher marketplace will be utilized to offer and deploy to and for customers and partners, starting with SAP HANA, express edition, which is already available, too. Further topics that are covered by this partnership are

• Improving Google’s containerization technologies for enterprise workloads
• Security, privacy, and integrity of customer data in the cloud. As part of this SAP software shall act as a data custodian (NB: How that works in legal and political environments remains to be seen) and joint solutions for access control, governance, risk and compliance shall get developed
• Integrate Google’s G Suite into SAP applications. This has already been implemented for Identity and Access Management.

More on the still fuzzy side are end-to-end integrations and collaborations in the areas of AI and machine learning. True to the SAP mantra of being an ecosystem player this is all about choice – choice for the customer to implement what is best for them.

My Take

Another interesting one!

Good Win for SAP

SAP now covers all major cloud platforms. HANA is now certified on AWS, Azure, and GCS, apart from running in the SAP cloud. With this SAP now has the broadest footprint when it comes to running on an IaaS platform. With the SAP Cloud Platform being available soon there also will be a very powerful PaaS solution on one of the strongest IaaS. It is interesting that there is no mention of the legacy software (SAP Business Suite) at the moment, although with HANA running on GCS it should be possible to migrate a Business Suite installation to GCS – as long as it runs on HANA – in near future. Another interesting aspect is that in the productivity arena there are a few overlaps between the G Suite and SAP solutions – think SAP Jam vs. Google Hangout. How easy will it be to use Hangout instead of (built in) Jam in future? Is that interesting for Google at all? However, far more interesting are the allegations of future potential: Bernd Leukert explicitly mentions end-to-end business processes and machine learning with some next announcements to be expected at the next SAPPHIRE NOW. For SAP this is where the real juice is: Like Salesforce and Oracle their CLEA solutions predominantly rely on company internal data and lack the far reach of external data. This is where Google (and IBM Watson) step in by their ability to contribute relevant insight from the outside. So, this partnership essentially closes a gap between SAP and Microsoft – while giving an edge above Salesforce, who just announced an AI partnership with IBM Watson, which on top cannot be expected to be targeted towards CRM types of applications as well. Lastly, GCP provides an ideal bed to run and scale IoT applications with their expected throughput- and scalability requirements.

What about Google?

Google gets an industry heavyweight to provide load on their infrastructure. Especially, if existing on-premise customers can get incentivized to migrate from their still predominantly Oracle-based instances to HANA based GCP instances; this can become a big one, as there are still tens of thousands of these instances available. Think the joint effort into containerization here … And the availability of SAP HANA Express Edition and soon the SAP Cloud Platform should drive a good number of developers onto the Google cloud. Additionally, it gives Google the opportunity to penetrate a Microsoft fortress: Microsoft Office is still very much a synonym for productivity apps in Enterprises. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the AI angle. Business AI needs both: Insight from inside the company and from outside the company. Vendor owned and driven AIs have a hard time delivering this. With the notable exception of Microsoft. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Baidu, Twitter,… and some specialized on business intelligence sit on an asset that enterprise software vendors desperately need. So, these might be the secret winners of the enterprise software clash of the titans. So, overall there is a big gain for Google in Enterprises looming.

And the competition?

There is a fight for dominance going on in Enterprise software. With Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP here are four main tribes. In general terms of enterprise software this partnership gives SAP some more headway against the strong competition, especially if SAP also gets their ecosystem strategy implemented somewhat better – they still are fairly hard to play with. On the CRM side this tack brings them closer to Microsoft and Salesforce. The race goes on.

Last but not Least: The Customers

All around good. Especially as it seems that this was a customer driven (Colgate Palmolive) innovation. SAP offers most choice but also needs to offer some guidance when it comes to choosing. Given that SAP or their implementation partners deliver this guidance, there is considerable gain in this partnership: Additional competition in infrastructure, more possibilities in productivity, and so on. For customers it all boils down to being enabled making the right choice.

On January 10, 2017, SAP announced a bundling of their IoT portfolio of initiatives to focus on business outcomes instead of technology while combining the set of emerging products and solutions under the brand name Leonardo – as in Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most forward looking artists and innovators ever. This announcement substantiates SAPs commitment to invest two billion Euro in IoT over the next 5 years. The new portfolio will combine adaptive applications, big data and connectivity as packaged line-of-business solutions, covering a range of topics. It bases upon a rebranded – and repackaged(?) HANA Cloud Platform, enhanced by the micro services for machine learning that were announced earlier and which I covered here. This enhanced platform is now called SAP Cloud Platform. As per a blog post accompanying the Leonardo announcement, the high level architecture of SAPs new offering looks like below and covers, besides a set of existing applications

• an IoT adapter – SAP Leonardo for Edge Computing – which serves as a device independent data input layer, essentially a kind of middleware, probably built on or using HCI.
• a foundational layer – SAP Leonardo Foundation – which includes the IoT business services that are to be exposed, enabling rapid development of applications. This makes up the functional core.
• and a ‘bus’ layer – SAP Leonardo Bridge – which enables the combination of real time data with applications and processes

Leonardo High Level Architecture - Source: SAP Leonardo is accompanied by a jump-start enablement program to accompany this initiative. This program includes introductory pricing and is intended to help organizations identify and validate IoT pilots and use cases, including expert staffing and using design thinking methodologies, thus easing the first IoT steps. Of course there will be a launch event to bring together customers, partners, and experts, showcasing innovations and strategies. According to Tanja Rueckert, EVP Digital Assets and IoT SAP with Leonardo connects “things with business processes and with people”.

My Take

This was long overdue. Overdue not only from SAP, but from any and every vendor. IoT is a means, not an end! As Brent Leary very recently said in a podcast with SearchCRM, IoT is still trying to make its way to provide value for businesses. This is imho due to the IoT market being vendor- and technology driven. SAP now takes the lead in tightly integrating technology into business process, and to show a clear path to business value. This fits neatly into the core of SAPs overall value proposition as an enterprise software company and it nicely combines numerous technologies and services that have been developed by SAP in the past years into a holistic piece that can deliver business value. I see this mainly as a rebranding instead of something net new, although there are some new pieces to this solution portfolio. This is also a bit of a concern. SAP now needs to keep up the momentum and deliver new intelligent, IoT based business solutions. What is interesting is the (important) combination of IoT and machine learning, which is mentioned only in the blog post, and which has the potential to make a real difference, e.g., when it comes to distributed intelligence. As a final word of caution, SAP only announced introductory promotional pricing. This means that there are still important open questions about pricing overall, which should be a worry for customers. However, overall this is good news for customers, as with this portfolio of services and technology every IoT investment can be tied to a business case and then business value. I expect that other big vendors SAP clearly takes a thought leadership position here, if not a technology leadership position.

Last week Freshdesk announced the acquisition of Bengaluru based SaaS data integration company Pipemonk, the seventh acquisition since mid of 2015. Pipemonk has been launched in 2014 and since has implemented integrations between many leading e-commerce-, accounting-, CRM-, Marketing-, and Billing applications, including Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Stripe. So far Freshdesk was not on their list. Pipemonk’s promise and objective is to deliver easy-to-setup, pre-built bi-directional integrations between SaaS applications. On their web site they reported to have more than 2,000 customers acquired in the short life span, with a seed capital of only 2 million dollar. So one can say that they delivered successfully. Freshdesk itself has its roots in customer service and since increased its portfolio to include help desk (hotline), a sales application (Freshsales), chat (Freshchat) and social testimonials using acquisitions and own developments.

My Take

I think that this was an important step for Freshdesk. It enables Freshdesk to easily expand its reach to integrate with a raft of SaaS applications in different business domains, prebuilt or custom. Further, I was wondering for a while whether and how Freshdesk would go on integrating their own application stack, which as per my understanding so far consists of different, only lightly (if at all) integrated applications – although my understanding may be wrong. Assuming that Freshdesk intends to continue their aggressive growth trajectory with this acquisition the team also has the foundation to integrate new and newly acquired functionality fast, based upon an established architecture. Overall, congratulations to both teams!

Yesterday SAP announced SAP HANA 2, an updated and improved version of its flagship product SAP HANA, and new SAP HANA microservices through SAP Hybris as a Service. SAP HANA 2 will be available for first customers on November 30 and an express edition shortly after its general availability. Note: if SAP talks about RTC this usually differs from General Availability, which is only after a successful ramp-up period of about 3 months to validate a product with early adopter customers. So the Express Edition will probably be released around end of Q1/2017. In usual bold marketing words SAP HANA 2 is poised to be a “new foundation for digital transformation” and is according to Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board, Products and Innovation at SAP SE, the continuation of “breakthrough innovation on a highly stable core data platform for our customers”. SAP HANA 2 shall deliver enhancements in the areas of database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application management as well as well as two more services for cloud customers: Text Analysis and Earth Observation Analysis. The latter in a beta status only. These latter two new HANA functionalities are likely to be the reason of tying the two announcements. The update cycle of HANA 2 shall be 6 months.

Some Observations

It is interesting that SAP refers to the new HANA services as microservices. This suggests that these services are built on top of the HANA 2 core – or else HANA itself has been rearchitected to be built on a microservice architecture. I rather think the former, also as the delivery is via YaaS. So, SAP is somewhat muddling the waters here. There is an enhancement to offload read-intensive workloads to secondary systems, with the reason to improve operations. While this seems sensible on the outset: Does this suggest that there are scaling problems with read operations? A new edition of the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application with a focus on information (data) architecture is part of the delivery. Data architecture is only a small part of Enterprise Architecture, in fact part of the Systems Architecture domain, which in itself is one of four domains. I’d be interested to have a look at this tool. The predictive analytics capabilities have been enhanced. Although the press release talks about “Analytical Intelligence” SAP does not jump on the bandwagon of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning here. This is interesting in itself. The extension of runtimes to support additional languages and the enhanced file processor API is an important step although the statement of build packs and runtimes “can be used within SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model” is sufficiently fuzzy to raise some question marks. There is no statement about upgrading/migrating from SAP HANA to SAP HANA 2.

My PoV

Assuming that the upgrade from SAP HANA to SAP HANA 2 is a simple upgrade we are definitely seeing an evolutionary approach here that combines additional functionality with ecosystem play and a (gentle) push into the cloud. The push to cloud is evidenced by making some interesting services, namely the trio of Text Analysis services, available via YaaS only. While the Earth Observation Analysis service is interesting in itself its highest significance probably lies in its suggestion for an upcoming industry orientation on top of HANA. This would cater for SAP’s solution orientated strengths. Making all these services available on top of the platform indicates the remuneration models SAP is going for: A base fee for platform and core applications plus usage based billing for sometimes important parts of functionality, which are delivered as metered services. It remains to be seen whether SAP finds a customer friendly balance here. The ecosystem play shows itself in adding language runtimes and the express edition that both will attract additional developers who will build new services and applications on top of HANA. Combined with YaaS this is a powerful model. A focus on analytics and integrating the platform into Enterprise Architecture is evident, although the EA angle likely needs quite some improvement. Why would I use the seemingly incomplete SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer when EA covers so much more than data architecture? However, the idea of using HANA as an architecture repository is quite intriguing. Analytics is a core (horizontal) part of a platform as it is important for nearly every business scenario. Here we are coming to a concern, which revolves around what has not been announced. While very much hyped the topics of AI and machine learning are important. And both are platform technologies, as advanced analytics capabilities are. Salesforce just nonchalantly, almost in a sub-clause announced their Einstein as being part of the platform. SAP so far keeps fairly silent on both topics, apart from a partnership with IBM Watson.