For very different reasons, this was another company that 1.5 years ago, I would never have included in a CRM leadership category despite their announced sales of CRM applications software. The application was kludgy, an afterthought to SAP ERP R/3 iterations of one form or another and it was ugly as sin. But I always liked the company, despite some notable tightness in their approach to business and life. I had seen it make some significant changes in its culture over the years to its benefit. Though Shai Agassi left, his contemporary thinking was still alive in larger pockets of the company. SAP Labs was doing some incredibly cool, though not very public things, such as combining structured and unstructured search and building some eminently readable reports. They limited it, at the time, for internal use (now part of their product engines) and all in all, they had a shot to be sumpin’, sumpin’. But SAP CRM was just so….bad. But then, (crank up the music, turn on the lights, set off the fireworks, start cheering) along came SAP CRM 2007 with a new Google-like very clean and attractive interface, the ability to develop and use enterprise mashups as widgets, improved useful functionality. The strength of this interface was so apparent to SAP that they announced that it would be universally applied to all SAP products across the board. And, wowzer, there is the promise of changes that are considerably more substantial than just CRM products. As great as the transformation of the CRM product has been, the fast-moving cultural shift across significant parts of the company - though not all of it - is even more remarkable - and is not temporary. This cultural transformation is tipped off by a couple of things. First, SAP’s unique approach to thought leadership, which is unparalleled in the industry. Second, the penetration through at least some of SAP’s pores of a collaborative culture - one that other 21st century businesses can learn from. As far as thought leadership goes, SAP has invested in creating a “Business Influencers Group” that has some 60 employees or so that has the sole job of finding, reaching out to and engaging in some way, business influencers in the analyst community, academic world, etc. This group is astounding in scope and capability and I think unique in the world of enterprise applications - perhaps IT in general. It is ably run by VP Don Bulmer. To add to this, they have a VP, Mike Prosceno, devoted to reaching into the blogging community for similar purposes. SAP’s commitment to mind share, not just market share, is genuinely staggering and entirely commendable. One example of how intelligent their approach is - they have initiated a series of webinars and forums on business leadership for the recession - what to do. This is not a “Buy SAP” thing. This is a “listen to business leaders on how to approach this downturn” thing. This is being done through their external facilitated social site, MyVenturePad, run by Social Media Today’s amazing Robin Carey. The other indicator of culture change - beginning in and around their CRM and mobile apps groups - was the development of their the mobile SFA application for the Blackberry. Not only were they collaborating with business partners, in this case RIM, and customers to develop products, but were willing to cede some control to those business partners and customers in order for all the participants to benefit from the value creation. Would that others would emulate this…sigh. The result was one very strong mobile CRM product (soon to be released). This is the best CRM application I’ve seen for the Blackberry to date. They don’t just talk a good Web 2.0 game either. They live it. They have two communities, SDN for developers and BPX for business analysts (in the process sense). They use all the social media tools. Are there problems with these social sites. Sure. But the scale is mindblowing. BPX is 350,000 and that’s the smaller of the two. SDN has 1.3 million developers engaging in collaboration and discussion. Innovation has been on their agenda too with both an internal industrial-strength Twitter-like product called ESME (enterprise social messaging experiment) something that ZDNET enterprise app guru Dennis Howlett was very involved with - and with a customer service 2.0 application that combines SAP, Business Objects application Insight and Twitter to come up with a customer service Twitter chatter monitoring tool. It not only locates the Twitter complaint or discussion about a flagged product or issue but also qualifies its emotional level (from love to hate or 1 to 5, so to speak) that, depending on the seriousness of the problem, will trigger specific workflow to alert the appropriate customer service “authority.” These are huge leaps forward, which I presume, will be eclipsed in a good way by the upcoming SAP CRM 7.0 when it’s released in 2009. But there are several things that could stand in SAP’s way in 2009 too. Their CRM vision remains murky at best - murky enough that if I ask you what that vision is, you wouldn’t be able to tell me, would you? That needs to be fixed now. But that’s not my primary concern. What is most disturbing to me - and their greatest impediment - is their falling further and further behind with the Business By Design business - whether they are falling behind by design or not. When they announced what would amount to an 18 month lag to this SaaS based offering back at 2008 Sapphire, I thought that was a serious mistake. I still do, but the way they are dealing with that is almost worse. Now they are saying that they’re concerned that BBD would be too expensive to them - via the loss of on premise revenue and according to Prashanth Rai, reporting on the late November Leo Aptheker attended SAP NY Roundtable, are almost pooh-poohing the importance of SaaS . Thing is they need to release it as soon as possible because in a recession, SaaS is going to rule the delivery roost and SAP will suffer if they don’t release a SaaS product. Their hiring of John Wookey, formerly of Oracle to run their SaaS enterprise offerings is a good start - but that’s what it is. A start. For another take on Business by Design, see Josh Greenbaum’s posting last May. Despite these issues, I expect that that SAP will be among the 2009 CRM 2.0 and CRM leaders with a brand new look and their remarkable thought leadership power.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
