SAP’s Sales OnDemand Strategy Reveals A Longer Term Product And Cloud Strategy
In an exclusive briefing on February 24th with SAP’s Executive Vice President of Line Of Business Applications, John Wookey, he provided fresh insight into the new product design and Cloud philosophy at SAP. This pre-CeBit announcement coincided with the SAP Analyst Day in Boston. A few take-aways from the briefing reveal:
- An investment in design thinking behind future Line-of-Business products. With consumer technologies entering the enterprise at a blistering pace, it’s become obvious that today’s enterprise apps only support a small percentage of the work people must accomplish on a daily basis. SAP’s Line Of Business apps team starts with a design thinking approach. The initial objectives leverage SAP’s rich history of process excellence, focus on people empowerment, and align with business objectives to achieve a clear purpose.etc.
Point of View (POV): The software industry has taken note in how Design Schools around the world solve problems in user experience and adoption. SAP’s design thinking process reflects the classical 7 phases of define, research, ideation, prototype, objectives, implement, and learn. Pairing a design thinking approach and agile development methodologies has led to an understanding of what tasks people need to get done and how to quickly create iterations. The result – more intuitive user experiences and new product releases every 6 months. More time is spent on upfront design not engineering. If successful, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe will have shown how his focus on agile will pay off across the development organizations.
- Solutions such as Sales On Demand (Sales OD) that empower people to be effective. From the beginning, the product begins with collaboration through the use of activity streams (i.e. Facebook, Twitter like user experience). Team collaboration is enhanced with access to key content, analytics, and even competitor information (see Figure 1). Design points focus on delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, on the right form factor. Analytics provide self-service reports (see Figure 2). Sales effectiveness concepts build around the 4Cs (i.e. the right context, right contacts, right content, and the right contract).
POV: Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions in the past failed to address the needs of the Sales Professional and the customer. As with most customer relationship management solutions, they covered the “M” in CRM and ignored the customer (C) and the relationship (R). SAP’s Sales On Demand product is different as it addresses the key issues in helping sales professional receive relevant information and collaborate with their networks in an intuitive manner. Users will be surprised that this is an SAP application. Despite only delivering 20% of the full SAP CRM suite Sales application capability, the 20% provided delivers 80% of the key capabilities to support sales person effectiveness.
Figure 1. Activity Streams (Feeds) Deliver A Intuitive And Collaborative User Experience
(Source: SAP)
Figure 2. Analytics Provide Sales Professionals With Relevant, Self-Service Insight
(Source: SAP)
- A steady stream of break through solutions to come. Sales OD is the first of many solutions to enter the market. Sourcing OnDemand has been available on the Frictionless platform for some time. Career on Demand and Travel on demand will arrive in 2H 2011. Other products on the list include Carbon Impact OnDemand, Business Intelligence OnDemand, and the top secret Project Columbus. All products will be designed to support new form factors including blackberries and iPads (see Figure 3).
POV: Despite jettisoning the Frictionless Commerce platform, the new solutions build on SAP’s Business ByDesign (ByD) platform. In retrospect, the benefits include process, meta data, and data integration with the rest of the ByD suite. Pre-packaged integration with the core NetWeaver stack and Business Suite 7 (BS7) will most likely show up in future releases. For SAP shops, these new Line Of Business OnDemand apps may provide a credible alternative to today’s best of breed SaaS players.
Figure 3. Product Design Accounts For Emerging And New Form Factors
(Source: SAP)
The Bottom Line: SAP’s New Approach Transforms More Than User Experience
Next generation applications address 10 key elements in order to capture the hearts and minds of users. These elements focus on three areas: dynamic user experiences, business process focus, and community connectedness. SAP’s OD strategy seeks to address these 10 elements. If successful, SAP could stem the losses from SAP customers seeking two-tier ERP and cloud strategies that surround the core SAP products.
However, SAP has some hard work ahead. The first releases come with limited features. Users will have to bet on SAP’s ability to quickly iterate and add grow the product footprint. In addition, for SAP to grow outside of its install base, these OD products must deliver good integration libraries that support hybrid clouds and mixed environments. Despite being a late comer to the cloud religion, this new SaaS offensive could provide the catalyst and design point for future SAP successes. Existing SAP customers should consider these OD solutions in head-to-head SaaS best of breed vendor selection short lists.
Your POV.
Will you make the move to SAP’s OnDemand applications? Are you an existing SAP customer looking at two-tier ERP? Will this keep you from looking at best of breed SaaS apps? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at r (at) softwareinsider (dot) org or info (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
Let us know how we can assist with:
- Building a Cloud Strategy
- Designing your apps strategy
- Addressing SAP new license and maintenance contract negotiations
- Supporting a Two Tier ERP analysis
Related Links
20110302 ZDNet:SocialCRM: The Conversation -Paul Greenberg “SAP Sales OnDemand, Got It, Got It, Need It?
20110302 TechTarget/SearchCRM.com – Barney Beal “SAP takes another shot at CRM on-demand”
20110301 TMCNet.com – Linda Dobel “SAP Sales OnDemand Presents New Competition To Rivals”
20110301 IDG News Service – Chris Kanaracus “SAP Readies Salesforce.com Rival”
20110301 IT World Canada – Jeff Jedras and Chris Kanaracus “SAP enterprise-class hosted CRM targets Salesforce.com”
20110301 Information Week – Josh Greenbaum “SAP Plays Games With the Analysts”
20110302 Beagle Research – Denis Pombriant “SAP @CeBit and Sales OnDemand”
20110302 Silicon.com – Nick Heath “SAP Eyes Facebook and Apple for secrets of success.”
Related Resources
20100808 User Event: SAP Australian User Group Summit
20100802 Vendor Event: SAP Teched 2010 Las Vegas
20100518 Event Report: Sapphire 2010 Brings Customers Back To A New Sense Of Normalcy
20100512 News Analysis: SAP Bets On Innovation With $5.8B Sybase Acquisition
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Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.
Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
14 Comments »
Ray,
Interesting to see the elephant adopt agile processes. The social toolsets out there are narrowing the playing field. On one hand, small software companies can compete with the largest thanks to social tools, VoIP, and robust cloud and open source infrastructure. On the other, large companies can become more agile and reduce the typical communications latency. Certainly, using a design approach is a good move by SAP given the overwhelming success of consumer products with elegant design and usability.
The trend towards line of business SaaS instead of vertical SaaS by larger firms interesting. Particularly CRM and HR. On the other hand, smaller firms are creating Enterprise 2.0 apps that are more vertically focused. Perhaps the vertical solution covering multiple lines of business is not yet practical for ERP companies to deploy with configuration. Mind you, SAP might discover that the problem really is too many (unused) features in the on-premises versions that provide too much noise to be useful. Less may be more here, indicating a mature market. So, SAP might be wise to hold back on the feature creep.
[...] fusión de esta funcionalidad en herramientas como Sharepoint, LotusNotes, Salesforce.com, el nuevo SAP CRM OnDemand, y en wikis como PBworks y SocialText. Y esta funcionalidad de usar el status update ahora incluye [...]
On Demand and Design Thinking go hand in glove. I’d be very reluctant about signing off on ERP investments without strategy like SAP.
A great API, as Twitter and Chatter have, allows to develop interfaces on post PC era devices. The way people are now working on iPad and Smartphones.
Nice to see Hasso Plattner’s interests and SAP’s investment in design thinking tie together. http://dschool.stanford.edu/
We have found that SAP CRM has shown that it is embracing innovative change, not just with SalesOnDemand, but also with it partnering approach for the on premise product.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSE7_4Tqk5c
[...] Review über SAP’s Line-of-Business OnDemand Strategy R “Ray” Wang diskutiert SAP’s On-Demand Produktstrategie. Besonderer Fokus liegt [...]
[...] Sourcing OnDemand has been blog.softwareinsider.org [...]
[...] post, with screen shots). Ray Wang (Constellation Group) did not attend personally but posted another take from his own briefing, also including screen shots. Update 4/1/2011: Dennis Howlett has posted a [...]
Recently there has been a resurgence of “Oracle surrounds SAP” print ads. While the strategy has been on since 2004, how good do you think its faired? And from a pure academics point of view, do you think this is good / bad positioning and good/bad implementation? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Shivani – thanks for your comments. Oracle is starting to surround SAP. We are seeing them gain apps share on SAP and in SAP accounts. This is good positioning b/c the overlap between SAP and Oracle customers is increasing. – Ray
I like the sap very as it get good knowledge and creativity.
[...] Explore other SAP offerings. Now with a broader portfolio, existing SuccessFactors customers who are not SAP customers may want to explore some of the other Line of Business Cloud offerings. [...]
[...] Explore other SAP offerings. Now with a broader portfolio, existing SuccessFactors customers who are not SAP customers may want to explore some of the other Line of Business Cloud offerings. [...]
[...] achieve the magic goal of 1B. Meanwhile, the efforts to grow out the edge applications in the OnDemand Large Enterprise proved to be slow to [...]
[...] OnDemand based approach. Meanwhile, a series of well designed, and compelling products from the SAP OnDemand for Large Enterprise initiatives remain under marketed, and in some cases late to market. Timing could not have been [...]
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