C/4 Is Dead, Long Live Qualtrics

One year ago, at Sapphire 2018, before Qualtrics was a thing in the SAP community, SAP CEO Bill McDermott promised customers the ultimate CRM suite. Competitors merely developed CRM programs – SAP would build an End-to-End CRM suite instead.

Back then, even chairman of the SAP supervisory board Hasso Plattner praised this integration idea. He was excited about its name, C/4, too.

It seems that everyone agreed that the ERP realm needed a new CRM suite – and who better to build it than SAP? It had all the building blocks it needed. A successful CRM program, logistics and SRM modules, an e-commerce system (Hybris), a CPQ cloud (Callidus), the best possible data platform (Hana) and SAP Data Hub.

SAP had almost every important ingredient for an integrated and successful CRM suite. In 2018, it bought the company Qualtrics for 8 billion dollars. As customer experience management software, it was the perfect addition for Bill McDermott’s vision of C/4.

SAP now only had to get rid of silos and consolidate all apps and modules to the Hana platform, and C/4 Hana would have been complete.

SAP customers expected to hear from C/4 Hana’s success at Sapphire 2019 – but that didn’t happen. Instead, Hasso Plattner talked about building bridges between Qualtrics and SAP’s own software.

So, what about Qualtrics?

A week after Sapphire 2019, at the annual general meeting of shareholders in Mannheim, Germany, Bill McDermott explained that Qualtrics will remain an independent unit with its own management. Not a single word about integration and C/4 Hana.

Qualtrics’ business is supposedly flourishing. SAP apparently gave the company many useful contacts and opened the right doors for them.

Qualtrics is a success story – but CRM suite C/4 may as well be dead.