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
·
Insight
·
Productivity
Only if they deliver on all four aspects are ‘platform
players’ able to provide their customers with what they need to involve
themselves in digital engagements that result in sustainably positive
experiences.
I will look at how the big four are measuring up in this and
the next article of this little series. Microsoft and SAP will be the starters.
Then I will look at Oracle and Salesforce.
I might conclude with some surprise additions.
But let the games begin!
Microsoft
Microsoft is the (not so, if you look sharply) hidden
champion of this game.
Actually, I think that Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in
this game.
It is Microsoft’s objective to become the fabric that
connects enterprises of all sizes with their stakeholders, including the
customers’ personal lives. And, as I have written earlier, they have all the
ingredients they need to achieve this objective.
With Azure there is one of the strongest IaaS and PaaS games
in the play. Including Azure Stack, Microsoft is capable of offering hybrid
deployments. And in all seriousness, hybrid clouds are here to stay for quite a
while. The Power* series of tools and applications helps extending the business
applications and the development environments are very powerful.
Microsoft is the clear leader when it comes to productivity
applications outside the core business applications, which are also tightly
integrated into the business applications for further impact.
On the insight side the company has few equals, being able
to leverage the power of both, LinkedIn and Bing, their own search engine, and
the wealth of data that comes from a plethora of different devices. This is
combined with strong analytics and machine learning capabilities, which can
create insight out of all the data.
Last but not least, Microsoft has one of the strongest
ecosystems on this planet. What they do not have themselves, someone else is
developing. Microsoft then embraces the partnership angle. A very visible
example for this is the current strategic partnership with Adobe. Microsoft
till recently did not have an enterprise grade multichannel marketing engine.
Nor an ecommerce system.
Finally, there is something else that needs to be
considered. As stated above, the enterprise market is saturated. All big
vendors, and many more small ones, are tackling the SMB market. Microsoft
Dynamics is not as high end as the competition but very suitable for the higher
end of the SMB market. This makes Microsoft interesting for companies that
would not look at SAP, Salesforce, or Oracle. Microsoft also runs a very strong
partnership
with Nimble, which opens up the Microsoft Dynamics world for small, but
growing businesses. On the flip side: Microsoft is not (yet) universally perceived
as a business applications company.
Still, the company is in a position that none of the other
vendors can take (yet): None of them is able to combine the enterprise value
chain with a productivity suite as powerful as Microsoft’s and a reach to the
end customer. Add some tremendous data assets and a strong ecosystem to the
mix. Exactly this breadth and width of the offering is Microsoft’s biggest
strength, which covers for functional weaknesses in some areas like supply
chain, ecommerce or marketing. If Microsoft is able to mitigate these
weaknesses while continuing to play to its strengths, the company should be
able to gain considerable market share on cost of one or more of the other
three.
SAP
Using Microsoft’s objective as a guideline, SAP is currently
the business vendor that is closest to being the fabric of enterprises. The
reason for this is the access to data in combination with the ability to
support the whole value chain of companies across a wide range of industries
and sizes.
Looking at the enterprise software market, SAP is the clear
leader in ERP software. On top of this, SAP has Ariba. Ariba, or the SAP
Business Network is one of the largest, if not the largest, business market
places around.
In combination, SAP can say that nearly 80 per cent of all
business transactions touch an SAP system, one time or another.
On top of this, with Gigya SAP owns one of the strongest
Customer Identity and Access Management platforms around. Via this platform SAP
manages more than 1.3 billion identities, along with their consents, across
hundreds of sites. The smart progressive profiling methodology that is built
into this software also helps with building valuable profiles out of these mere
identities.
In combination with SAP’s strong analytics capabilities, the
company is able to generate extremely valuable insight to businesses.
In addition SAP, like Microsoft and Oracle, covers the
complete value chain of businesses, just that SAP’s offering is probably
stronger than that of the competition. This, again, gives SAP customers vast
amounts of consistent data that can be utilized to offer more value to their
customers.
This application strength in what SAP calls the ‘digital
core’ is also a good part of its platform. Add to it an SAP Cloud Platform
(SCP) that offers the majority of services that an agile business needs and
that gets increasingly stronger we have a very strong (PaaS) platform play.
This platform, along with one of the strongest partner ecosystems around can
open up the SMB market, and hence strong growth, for SAP.
Talking about its ecosystem, SAP has a wide variety of
implementation and consulting partners, that support each other and get support
via platforms like the SAP Community Network SCN, or the SAP Partner Edge.
SAP positions itself as an enterprise software player, as
opposed to a full stack player like, e.g. Microsoft. Consequently, the
company’s IaaS capabilities are limited. Instead, SAP is pursuing a multi cloud
approach by being able to have its software run on all major infrastructures.
This is a smart move as it keeps the company’s independence while offering
choice to clients.
One of the company’s better kept secrets – SAP Business by
Design – is a central element of its strategy to address midmarket companies.
Apart from the prevailing (but increasingly wrong) opinion
that SAP is difficult to deal with, SAP’s weakest spot is productivity in the
sense of office products. The company covers this topic via integrations with
Microsoft’s suite of applications, and
probably Google apps soon. But, to be sure, efficient, and automated
execution of business processes is at the heart of SAP’s value proposition.
If SAP continues to play on its ERP strength while pursuing the
newly established focus on its Customer
Experience unit it has a good chance to stay one of the dominant players.
In Summary
Here we have two companies that are greatly positioned in a
platform market. With different starting points and strenghts they share
similar visions. And they work hard towards it.
Exciting times.
But let us see how Oracle and Salesforce are playing their
cards – or should be.
A bientot!
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