Skip to main content

SAP CRM - Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Back in February I argued that SAP does not exhibit a real strategy in the CRM world and is leaving on premise customers out in the cold with all the talk focusing on HANA, having Hybris, Cloud for Customer, doing lots of (often good) stuff for on-demand solutions while minimising investments into their powerful, yet somewhat outdated, on premise products.
And this without a migration path. 
While it was clear that Hybris is to become the leading entity - after all "Customer Engagement and Commerce" was organised around Hybris there have been a number of products and solutions with overlapping scope, mainly in a still emergent state - yes, I am talking about the C4C suite of products.
 It was, and likely still is, not really clear  to customers whether there is a better transition than re-implementation for them and how it could work. 
  • Along came Hybris marketing, maybe initially a re-branding of the marketing cloud but nowadays more and more integrated into Hybris itself; although based on HANA whereas Hybris Commerce still can be run without. And then came more B2B functionalities and YaaS - Hybris as a Service. This at least shows a pathway for companies that are willing to adopt SAP cloud "CRM". Along with the existing service capabilities of Hybris we are starting to see a positive trend emerging. Hybris might become it, albeit we are still seeing a lot of toolkit character.
But still, what about existing customers?
Hybris release 5.7, after a long time, gives the hint of an answer to this question: 
  • Master Data Integration, including customers, contact persons, products, installed base
  • integrated order management (asynchronous/synchronous), pricing
  • service requests and contracts
While SAP chose a cumbersome way for these integrations: IDocs via CRM Middleware - a recipe for hard work - we now see a glimpse into a migration future as opposed to a re-implementation future. Finally there is an out-of-the-box possibility to consistently use and later migrate a company's most valuable asset - customer data - into SAP's hybrid world that that comes before getting complete on premise processes into the cloud.
So far we need to be aware that the data model of SAP CRM is far more powerful than the one of Hybris, so there are still a lot of hard questions to be answered.
But there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Comments

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

SAP CRM and SAP Jam - News from CRM evolution

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first – after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many...

How to play the long game Zoho style

The news On February 7 and 8 2024, Zoho held its annual ZohoDay conference, along with a pre-conference get together and an optional visit to SpacX’s not-too-far-away Starbase. Our guide, who went by Chief, and is probably best described as a SpaceX-paparazzi was full of facts and anecdotes, which made the visit very interesting although we couldn’t enter Starbase itself. The event was jam-packed with 125 analysts, 17 customer speakers, and of course Zoho staff for us analysts to talk to. This was a chance we took up eagerly. This time, the event took place in MacAllen, TX, instead of Austin, TX. The reason behind this is once more Zoho’s ruralization strategy, transnational localism.  Which gives also one of the main themes of the event. It was more about understanding Zoho than about individual products, although Zoho disclosed some roadmaps. More about understanding Zoho in a second.  The second main theme was customer success and testimonials. Instead of bombarding us with...

SaaS or the Rise of the Undead

SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it - or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight.  I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendors‘ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been “no lock in by vendors”, “only pay...

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...

Zoho - A True Unicorn

End of January Zoho held its 2020 Zoho Days, an analyst summit, which I was happy to attend, along with more than 60 colleagues, as the only analyst from Germany, as it seems. Sadly, it took me quite a while to complete this – Zoho deserves a faster commentare. But hey, let’s look forward and get rolling. Zoho is a privately owned enterprise software company that has quietly evolved from a small software company in 1996 to an ambitious global player that serves the SMB- and enterprise CRM market with cloud applications. The company has a set of 45+ business apps with more than 50 million users, 10 data centres and counting, and is available in 180 countries. The company is profitable and maintained a CAGR of more than 30 percent over the past five years. But why quietly? Because Zoho managed its growth pretty unusually (almost) fully organically with only very minor acquisitions. Crunchbase lists one. Following this unique approach, which defies the tradit...