Three announcements affecting CRM came out of SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW annual conference, held in Orlando on June 5–7:

  • A renewed focus on CRM in order for SAP to be considered a viable player in the $45 billion CRM market. SAP’s cloud CRM (formerly known as SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer) is renamed SAP C/4HANA.
  • The acquisition of a field service company, Coresystems, which will replace the field service capabilities within the old SAP Service Cloud.
  • The introduction of the SAP HANA Data Management Suite for secure data governance, quality, orchestration, compliance, and insights.

Let’s parse these announcements through a CRM lens. For a DX perspective, read our blog: “C/4HANA: SAP’s Industrialization Of Customer Engagement

SAP C/4HANA

  • This is the rebranded SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer. It consists of SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud (includes products from the Gigya acquisition), and SAP Sales Cloud (includes products from the CallidusCloud acquisition).
  • The suite will adopt the Fiori user experience, and plans are to integrate recent acquisitions and port applications to the SAP Cloud Platform.
  • The suite will have a single data model.
  • The suite leverages the AI strengths of the Leonardo platform for tasks such as ticket intelligence, product and offer recommendation, lead routing, influencer mapping, and customer health scoring. There are many more AI-driven scenarios coming.

Coresystems

  • Coresystems offers end-to-end field service capabilities: work order management, field scheduling, dispatching, knowledge management, and customer self-service.
  • Coresystems taps into the freelance or gig economy workers to expand the badged employee workforce.

What it means

SAP C/4HANA is not just the third rebrand of SAP’s cloud CRM assets in almost as many years. Underpinning this rebrand is a company prioritization of CRM development, with product teams aligned under Alex Atzberger, president of SAP Hybris. SAP has a ways to go to pull its assets together to work on the SAP Cloud Platform, yet the vision is sound.

SAP is making few but solid acquisitions to strengthen its cloud CRM portfolio, such as Gigya, CallidusCloud, and Coresystems. Others are sure to follow.

With the front-office SAP C/4HANA and back-office SAP S/4HANA, SAP presents a vision of intelligent business transformation that goes beyond traditional CRM and ERP. It will especially resonate with SAP’s core industries of manufacturing, utilities, professional services, CPG, and retail.