 |
| Source: Forrester Wave CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Businesses Q4/16 |
Finally,
the much-anticipated Forrester Wave on CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Businesses Q4/2016
has been published by Kate Leggett
and her team at Forrester Research.
Besides the
usual suspects Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP it covers 7 more vendors
that fulfil Forrester’s definition of a CRM suite for mid-sized businesses.
This
definition roughly is
· To be considered a suite the
software covers at least three of the CRM disciplines
o
Marketing
o
Sales
Force Automation
o
Customer
Service
o
Field
Service
o
E-Commerce
o
Customer
Analytics
· There needs to be prebuilt
integration between the products, if they are not within the same system;
integration shall be via open standards to allow for integrating other
applications.
· The software needs to be targeted at
organizations between 250 and 999 employees.
· Multiple industries need to be
targeted.
Of course,
the solutions need to be in active use and there need to be customer
references.
The
Forrester Wave has some interesting results, some confirming what other people
see, too, others somewhat surprising.
 |
| Source: Forrester Wave CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Businesses Q4/16 |
Let me
start with the confirmations, continue with bits that surprised me, and close
with an SAP specific view.
The Confirmations
Of course,
we are talking cloud – cloud and nothing else.
As can be expected
all vendors strive to deliver a toolset that helps their customers to deliver
consistent customer experiences. Now I, and others, would argue that the
experience is largely in the realm of the end customer and the users and that
there is nothing like a ‘system of experience’. Delivering consistent
experiences encompasses far more than a CRM suite. But then it is far easier
(and sexier) to talk about delivering experiences than about systems of record
and engagement that help in giving customers a great experience.
The CRM
landscape has just exploded, yet is quite mature – which sounds like a
contradiction in itself, but just shows the power of the cloud and modern
architectures – in particular micro services – to drive innovation. Despite
lots of consolidation going on in parallel, too, there are suites targeting
different sizes of organizations, different industries. All of them deliver
different breadth and width of functionality. Then there are plenty of
best-of-breed vendors that may or may not commit to one of the major platforms;
some of them may or may not be viable, or might just get acquired. In essence, smaller
vendors try to eat the bigger vendors’ lunches and to push the contenders
upmarket by providing good point solutions with great user interfaces. The
contenders are responding by increased modularization, with acquiring
functionalities they need to close their functional gaps, and with an ecosystem/platform
play.
The ‘Triple
I’ of Integration, Industry, Intelligence finally becomes key. To me it has
been obvious for more than a decade but the concept now gets real traction. Integration
and intelligence because of advances in technology, industry due to a
realization that no one can be everything for everyone; this only bloats the
systems and ultimately makes them clunky, expensive, and unmaintainable.
Finally, it
is no surprise that the big 4 show up as leaders. Oracle, Microsoft and
Salesforce are currently a given, and SAP worked hard on their strategy, messaging
and delivery. Since 2016 they in my opinion have a very competitive solution
set with their Hybris branded products. Salesforce still leads the pack but
will feel some real challenge by Microsoft if they get their marketing
functionality sorted and finally offered an integrated e-commerce solution. The
latter could be a real push. Ah, yes, an improved pricing engine couldn’t harm,
either – but that holds true for Salesforce, too.
The Surprises
Yes, there
are a few. Starting with bpm’online. I wouldn’t have expected to see them as a
leader, but apparently, they have significant strength in SFA and their
platform, combined with transparent pricing and very happy customers.
Congratulations. Build on these strengths, work on some of the perceived ‘weaknesses’
– I’d recommend e-commerce, marketing, and customer service to start with.
Pegasystems
is not in. OK, looks like their client base is a bit too far on the Enterprise
side.
SAP has a
low score in e-commerce. What? Given Hybris being one of the strongest
e-commerce solutions around, this is a bit of a surprise. Let me resolve this
conundrum in the SAP section.
What this means for SAP
Welcome
back amongst the leaders! This is long overdue, but SAP’s absence as a leader
was largely self-inflicted. Poor strategy, poor messaging, poor products.
Finally, this changed.
But why the
low marks in the e-commerce section? The devil is in the detail. Forrester sees
only a loose coupling of e-commerce to the rest of the suite. Hybris Commerce
essentially is still seen as a standalone product that can be plugged into the
CRM landscape. This, besides being a challenge for in-depth integration also
leads to user experience challenges and a few product inconsistencies like
having customer service functionality in Hybris Commerce as well as in Hybris Cloud
for Service. But again, Hybris Commerce is one of the strongest e-commerce
solutions around.
Then there
are some smaller tidbits, which are mainly around Field Service, platform, and
pricing – with the latter being a recurring, eternal topic. Increased pricing
transparency would be a real boon. Regarding field service and platform SAP
seems to be on a good way with the release of SAP HANA 2 and ongoing work in
what SAP calls the high touch service area.
In closing,
for SAP this Forrester Wave marks both, a success, and a little setback. The
success lies in them having managed to make it back into the leaderboard,
albeit barely, due to them now having resolved above three issues.
The setback
lies in the fact that they haven’t been able to fully sell the integration
story between e-commerce and the rest of the Hybris branded products. While the
cloud for customer and marketing products are built on SAP HANA, Hybris
Commerce is not. This is clearly a platform gap. Furthermore, the integration between
Hybris Commerce and the other products still is limited. On the other hand
Hybris Commerce not being built on SAP HANA can help SAP to sell into non SAP
customer bases. So, I personally would not see it as much of a problem as
Forrester does. Still, some more work is clearly necessary on both ends,
technically as well as from a messaging point of view.
For more
coverage on SAP, refer to below articles.
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