SAP boosts customer relationship management

SAP has fulfilled its ambition to disrupt the marketplace for customer relationship management (CRM) with the formal introduction of a new suite of applications, SAP C/4HANA, to help businesses serve and retain customers. SAP also announced the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the industry’s first comprehensive data management solution thatenables companies to turn data sprawl into business value.

The announcement was made by SAP CEO Bill McDermott at the company’s annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

SAP C/4HANA is an integrated offering designed to modernize the salesonly focus of legacy CRM solutions. Following the completed acquisitions of market leaders Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud, SAP now ties together solutions to support all front-office functions, such as consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.

“SAP was the last to accept the status quo of CRM and is now the first to change it. The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain.”

The new SAP C/4HANA suite will offer full integration with SAP’s business applications portfolio, led by its marketleading ERP suite, SAP S/4HANA. The combination of assets features new machine learning capabilities from SAP Leonardo, a set of intelligent technologies the company introduced last year,as well as the new SAP HANA Data Management Suite,which enablescompanies to gain visibility and control of their highly distributed data. The company’s overall strategy, focused on helping businesses run as intelligent enterprises, highlights the demand for a balanced approach to automation in the workplace.

SAP also announced it has acquired Switzerland-based Coresystems AG to improve field-service customer experience, especially in the manufacturing, energy, high-tech and telecommunications industries. Coresystems’ platform service provides real-time scheduling for customer-service requests and uses artificial intelligence-powered crowdservice technology.

This broadens the service technician pool to include company employees, freelancers and industry partners to assign the best-qualified technician to each call by taking into account expertise, location and availability of the individual service expert.

All systems rely on data,yet the challenge facing companies today is distributed data — data that is not just in transactional systems but scattered across products, machines and people. It is about data that must be ingested, prepared and made enterprise relevant. SAP HANA Data Management Suite enables enterprises to turn massive amounts of data — both structured and unstructured —into valuable, usable knowledge,no matter where it resides.

SAP HANA Data Management Suite allows customers to maximize the potential of their data safely, simply and efficiently.