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| Product to Service |
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 delineation between SAP Hybris and SAP.
Carsten Thoma: “We want to focus on all the products that are enablement
products” and “if you talk about experience, this is actually what we are
focused on”. In other words, the
‘traditional SAP’ concentrates on the transactional part of the software – the
heavy lifting – whereas SAP Hybris focuses on customer- and employee facing
software.
However, being challenged about SAP Hybris
Marketing both, Thoma and Marcus Ruebsam, SVP Global Head of Solution
Management, SAP Hybris, admit that in spite of having a sizeable number of
developers on the product, there is a need to balance new innovations for the
‘next wave’ with what “you have to do [for] today”, but first priority remains
the creation of a complete view on the customer. According to Macus Ruebsam the
Marketing Data Management piece is crucial, including the combination of online
and offline data. Optimization using Abakus
drives results and the first party data abilities of Gigya
will add further value.
SAP sees the keys for being successful
tomorrow as data management and enablement.
The day’s second Q&A was about the
Revenue Cloud, featuring Adobe as a customer. The message to be conveyed was
that SAP’s revenue cloud helps a customer with a complex, heterogeneous systems
architecture turning their products into services while having the ability to
measure and monitor to offer the “best matching contract”. Quizzed here the
Adobe representative more or less admitted that “best” means best for Adobe,
not necessarily for the customer, which depicts how far companies still need to
go in terms of customer centricity.
Day Two
Rob Enslin’s keynote
on day two brought the audience closer to how SAP intends to address the
challenges facing businesses. This keynote, substantiated by a demo that led
the audience through the process of acquiring a drone through a service
incident, and upselling showed in how far SAP sees IoT and Machine Learning
permeating applications. The storyline showed the audience everything from intelligent
recommendations through an IoT data driven service call with resolution and a
profile driven upsell process. The bold statement made by Moritz Zimmerman was
that SAP is the only company that can deliver this breadth of services, stretching
from (customer) acquisition through sales, and service, to billing, and being
powered on one platform – supported by IoT and Machine Learning (phew, what a
monster of a sentence …).
The keynote got closed with an appearance
of fast speaking futurist Sophie Hackford who animatedly told the audience that
“Minority Report”
with all its continuous surveillance and advertising is already an exciting
reality. To be honest, I found that more than slightly dystopian.
My PoV and Analysis
Overall I think that this was a good event
for SAP Hybris, although in my eyes too much centered around ecommerce. The
event could have benefited from more messaging around engagement and
enablement. Also the number of press releases was surprisingly low. Still, a
good event that gave a view on strategy.
With a storyline that stretches from
(customer) acquisition through service and revenue (Revenue Cloud) and that
supports the vision of a networked and subscription based economy, SAP Hybris has
a compelling and consistent vision of the future. I, however, would suspect
that other companies will contradict the bold statement that SAP is the only player
that can deliver on this functional breadth. Microsoft, Oracle, and even
Salesforce do make the same claim.
Where SAP is right, though, is that the
vast majority of transactional data – 76 per cent – at one time or the other
touches an SAP system. This in all likelihood is due to the Ariba network. This is a very good basis for machine
learning, however one should not forget that SAP’s customers own this data, not
SAP. Still, combining this data with the profiling possibilities that Gigya
promises, there is a tremendous potential, even if it is on the leash of
privacy regulations.
It will be interesting to see how the
repositioning of YaaS to become an enterprise repository of (not so) micro
services pans out. The short term vision seems to be establishing it as the new
basis for delivering added services to SAP solutions, which is not dramatically
different from now.
However, being based on and integrated into
the SAP Cloud platform it has the potential to re-architect the way SAP builds
and delivers software, as well as customers and partners. Integrated with the
Revenue Cloud the new YaaS is a showcase of how the subscription economy could
look like.
On the downside, although SAP’s vision is
compelling, I know some customers that complain about missing functionality,
e.g. in the subscription area (Revenue Cloud) or (e-mail) campaign execution. They
regard these functionalities as basic and essential. There consequently is a
gap between narrative and reality or perception that needs to get closed. This
either requires a different balancing between going for the ‘next thing’ and
fulfilling current needs or more education.
Regardless what it is, this gap needs to be
closed.
Famous Last Words
One more word on the topic of subscription
economy. SAP execs times and again used ‘sharing economy’ as synonymic to it, naming
Uber and Airbnb as prime examples.
There is nothing like a sharing economy!
The term ‘sharing’ implies altruism. These
companies, at best, are using peoples’ altruism to their benefit. These
companies, as well as SAP’s vision are about a platform economy, and dominating
markets (plural!) by scaling to become the strongest platform around. Part of
it is using the data that customers willingly or reluctantly give. There is no
altruism whatsoever involved.
Acknowledging this more openly would be
good for all involved parties. That builds trust. After all, lacking trust was cited
as the number one reason for customers (consumers) to abandon a brand.
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