aheadCRM

A little recap As it has been some time since I published Clash of Titans – Platform Play , the first part of this little series, let me start with a little recap. The business applications market, especially the CRM market, is evolving fast. CRM has morphed from concentrating on transactions to become an enabler of engagements. Engagements in turn result in experiences. And positive experiences are what companies want to achieve. In a digital world this is possible only if companies rely on a foundation, a (technical) platform. Becoming the provider of the dominant technical platform therefore has become the main goal of of the big business software vendors. However, even governing a great technical platform is not enough. Software vendors that want to be successful platform players need to be able to deliver on four areas to succeed: ·       Platform (IaaS/PaaS) ·       Ecosystem ·    ...

Platform Play, photo by Gabriel Jimenez A lot has evolved since my Clash of the Titans post that looked into how the big 4.5 (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe) and others are positioning themselves in the greater CRM arena. First, the commoditization of the business application has accelerated and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has increased. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. The obvious reason for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences need a consistent technical platform. Or else we are ending up in engagements that are fragmented across interactions. This results in inconsistent and poor experiences. So far, so well known. A bit less obvious is the fact that there will be only few dominant platforms. Vendors, who want to become and stay successful on a grand scale need to ...

During SAPPhire 2018 SAP announced C/4HANA with quite a fanfare. I covered and analysed this announcement in my post SAPPHIRE 2018 – The Return of the Suite . Sure, C/4HANA marks the return of SAP to the suite, just in another shape than previously known. Instead of combining the pillars of CRM: Marketing, Sales, and Service in one monolithic application it integrates the corresponding clouds into a suite by means of an infrastructure-, service-, and integration layer called SAP Cloud Platform. The SAP Cloud Platform also provides services like IoT and Blockchain, besides numerous additional and less sexy, but necessary ones. C/4HANA Architecture; source: SAP The SAP Cloud Platform also enables extensibility of the clouds, be it in-app (‘in cloud’) or as external extensions via the Extension Framework and the (upcoming) Microservices Ecosystem. The SAP Cloud Platform, as well as a number of in-cloud features enable AI and machine learning, exposed as...