Following the completed acquisitions of market leaders Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud, SAP now ties together solutions to support all front-office functions, such as consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.
With this in mind, barely 24 hours ago, SAP CEO Bill McDermott kicked off the Sapphire Now Conference in Orlando Florida. Sapphire Now is an annual cloud and business technology conference where game-changing technologies come to the fore.
During the opening keynote, the term game-changing technologies came to the fore right front and centre with McDermott introducing SAP C/4HANA. This latest integrated offering from SAP is designed to modernize the sales-only focus of legacy CRM solutions.
“We have moved from a 360 degree view of sales automation where some companies focus to a 360 degree view of the actual customer,” said McDermott, adding that even though he company was the last to accept the status quo of CRM, it has become the first to change it.
The new SAP C/4HANA suite will offer full integration with SAP’s business applications portfolio, led by its market-leading ERP suite, SAP S/4HANA. The combination of assets features new machine learning capabilities from SAP Leonardo, a set of intelligent technologies the company introduced last year.
Also included will the new SAP HANA Data Management Suite, which enables companies to gain visibility and control of their highly distributed data. The company’s overall strategy, focused on helping businesses run as intelligent enterprises, highlights the demand for a balanced approach to automation in the workplace.
Expanding its customer service solutions offerings, SAP also announced it has acquired Switzerland-based Coresystems AG to improve field-service customer experience. This is especially relevant to the manufacturing, energy, high-tech and telecommunications industries.
Coresystems’ platform service provides real-time scheduling for customer-service requests and uses artificial intelligence-powered crowd-service technology. This broadens the service technician pool to include company employees, freelancers and industry partners to assign the best-qualified technician to each call by considering expertise, location and availability of the individual service expert.
Managing Data to Reach Customers
All systems rely on data, yet the challenge facing companies today is distributed data — data that is not just in transactional systems but scattered across products, machines and people. It is about data that must be ingested, prepared and made enterprise relevant. SAP HANA Data Management Suite enables enterprises to turn massive amounts of data — both structured and unstructured — into valuable, usable knowledge, no matter where it resides. SAP HANA Data Management Suite allows customers to maximize the potential of their data safely, simply and efficiently.
More About SAP C/4HANA
The SAP C/4HANA portfolio includes SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud (including the acquired Gigya solutions) and SAP Sales Cloud (including the acquired CallidusCloud solutions).
Additionally, SAP Sales Cloud unites the SAP Hybris Revenue Cloud solution and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (comprised of SAP Hybris Sales Cloud and SAP Hybris Service Cloud solutions).
These cloud solutions — formerly on the market under the SAP Hybris brand name — as well as SAP’s commerce and customer engagement organization are now consolidated under the SAP Customer Experience business unit to support a consistent brand experience.