At the beginning of February, SAP published a blog post about SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s vision for the future integration of Qualtrics as part of C/4 Hana. Also, at SAP’s press conference earlier this year, McDermott promised a spectacular year for SAP’s new CRM vision C/4.
Obviously, SAP is tirelessly working on its weapon against Salesforce. And most probably, Bill McDermott will make it a point to present C/4 Hana at Sapphire 2019 in Orlando – exactly where he announced it one year ago.
S/4 Hana is SAP’s attempt to consolidate its ERP offer from infrastructure to applications. This is a reasonable decision. However, there is a lot of effort involved – and the consolidation is happening rather slowly. Until recently, the data interface between SAP Ariba and the ERP core was a CSV file!
C/4 is an even bigger challenge. That’s partly due to SAP continuing to acquire new software to integrate. Nobody knows for certain if Qualtrics was the last acquisition for C/4!
A long way to go
Maybe it is a logical decision to combine all external products like Hybris, Ariba, Callidus, and Qualtrics with the ERP core (CRM, SCM, logistics, etc.) to get the promised E2E function, the so-called Experience Management Software. However, SAP still has a long way to go until it can present tangible results.
I mean, just take a look at S/4: When did SAP present it, and where are we now? It’s reasonable to assume that C/4 will follow this path and pace.
There is some confusion as to why some SAP partners like itelligence are now claiming that C/4 Hana has been sold and customized already. That’s great and all, just one little question: How? C/4 is not finished. Was a half-done solution implemented? Do SAP customers have to stand in as SAP’s guinea pigs again?
The answer is simple and almost reassuring. On June 5th, 2018 at the annual SAP User Conference Sapphire, SAP announced the rebranding of Hybris to SAP Customer Experience C/4 Hana. That means whoever is buying C/4 now gets high-quality Swiss software that has been leveraged very successfully for many years.
So, whoever can do without a comprehensive E2E integration with the SAP core system, can easily use Hybris – sorry, C/4.
This is the biggest problem that legacy software vendors face today – they have many different dated solutions, modular and often acquired over time from different developers.
It’s quite impossible to instantly build a better platform than Salesforce (or whatever they are trying to compete with), who has been building their platform for two decades in the cloud.
Converting old applications to the cloud or to other modern infrastructures just does not work, everything must be coded again from scratch.
But the ideology and how cloud applications work – or can effectively work – is much different than of on-premise solutions, which means that not only these solutions must be coded again from scratch, but also fully rethought and re-designed.
Thanks!
Simon