SAP on the Cloud

Social Media: don’t “just do it”, but apply Social CRM strategies

June 27, 2012 by Sven Denecken

First of all we need to apologize for borrowing that famous “just do it” slogan from Nike and putting it completely out of context. Well, now that I’m thinking about it isn’t that what actually happens with Social Media, too? Social Media users talking about us, our products, brands, what they like or dislike about us? Is that all brought in context with our Social Media or general customer-facing activities?

Our Co-Innovation team has had a lot of discussions with cutting-edge Marketing departments of leading B2C and B2B companies, in which we observed this first hand. Companies are storming to where their customers are – on the Web – specifically Social Networks of course. Not surprisingly, there is tremendous buzz around Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Co. whose growth is truly astonishing.
In fact, most companies – especially in B2C – have experimented with or successfully established Social Media activities (e.g., campaigns on Facebook fan pages or YouTube, new twitter channels, etc.) by now.

However, from close engagements with customers on related initiatives our team has come to the conclusion that companies are now challenged to adopt new ways if they want to harness the opportunities while better managing the challenges and threats around Social Media. Basically, the old “just do it” approach is truly history and a more strategic Social CRM approach that is aligned with the holistic CRM strategy is clearly emerging.

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How to gain competitive advantage by using Cloud Computing

January 5, 2012 by Peter Laemmer

Competitive advantage occurs when an organization acquires or develops an attribute or combination of attributes that allows it to outperform its competitors. Within the context of cloud computing I would see competitive advantage

-if a company can grow revenue, e.g. through a faster product development cycle

-if a company can improve their cash flow, e.g. through cost savings

-if a company can improve effectiveness, e.g. through speeding up processes.

Managers can use Cloud Computing to outperform their competitors in different areas:

#1: Productivity

Companies often use allocated development in different areas, e.g. for the development of new products. Let´s assume you have to consider design features and technical features. For that you have a design office in Berlin and the technical department is based in Shanghai. In this case you have to share a lot of information between both facilities. If companies want to offer this service internally they have to invest in hardware and manpower in order to maintain the service.

There exist cloud-based services, where a company can share all sorts of files and information in order to accelerate the time to bring the product to the market. They do not need to set-up such a time and cost intensive environment. They buy the required service and according to Christensen´s law they gain competitive advantage with a faster product launch.

#2: Information

Companies need to select the right data that deliver the right information to make decisions, evaluate investments, support actions and a lot more.  There exist cloud services that deliver the appropriate hardware and algorithms that have the capacity to exactly do that. Companies can focus on their business while choosing the required service in the cloud to support it.

Often these services are used to select and analyze a huge amount of customer data. SAP currently announced the partnership with C2B Company NetBase. This company specialized on the analysis of social media data that is produced from customers. With these insights companies can gain “socialknowledge” and at the end can outperform their competitors (see Blog from Sven Denecken)

#3: Platform as a Service (PaaS) as development framework

Companies need to standardize their processes and applications even more when they decide to transfer parts of their IT in the cloud. They should do that to use cloud services with a maximum benefit. But nevertheless, they have to develop own applications for their business.  They can do that on their own infrastructure, set-up the required servers, configure it, and maintain it. Or they can use cloud based development frameworks. The developed applications are deployed by the owner of the PaaS and made available via a store. The SAP Business ByDesign Studio is an example where a developer community can work on a cloud-based PaaS in order to deploy and distribute their software – even  via a portal called SAP Store. Customers get access to the store in order to download the required services.

Understanding the employee – or in tech speak: the end-user is the currency

January 3, 2012 by Sven Denecken

Listening to our favorite songs, updating with friends, taking child photos or checking on our latest emails…the way we consume products and how we manage daily activities has significantly changed over the last decades. New trends and technologies emerged, having a profound impact on consumption patterns and working style of today’s generation.  While many still wonder or even push back, change has happened.

While not so long ago we were used to applying multiple gadgets to listen to music, checking agendas and sharing photos with others by sending it via email, more and more today have clear expectations on how to effectively handle his day to day activities based on latest technology trends and innovations.

Most of us I think will agree that we don’t want to miss out on our smart phones after we started to appreciate how their versatility helps us being more efficient in our daily activities and routines. Though it starts to get a problem when you not longer know where the “off” button is – literally and metaphorically speaking.

But let´s face it – very similar trends can also be observed in the business world. New technologies and innovations allowed us to make better use of business software and to facilitate the complexity when working with large enterprise systems. Yet the concept of such software merely remained the same over years, focusing primarily on processes, transactions and compliance aspects.

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Knowledge is power! How Social Monitoring & Analytics sets the foundation for more insightful customer operations

December 21, 2011 by Sven Denecken

Ever since famous author & philosopher Sir Francis Bacon coined the phrase “knowledge is power,” there have been millions of great examples for why this amazingly simple statement holds so much truth and wisdom.

Let’s not waste time discussing all the different meanings and angles (social, political, etc.) to this this quote. Instead we will relate it to a key trend we are observing in IT today. Let’s make a big jump in history from when the quote originated in 16^th century. While one might argue that knowledge, social extraction, and education still remains a source of power for individuals in 21^st century, we observe that today’s IT allows us to tear down such walls for organizations and companies.
In fact, it’s been advancements in IT that allowed us to better manage our business operations, more easily reach out to and serve customers in far away places, or just simply better understand who we are selling to. It is fair to say that we – at SAP – have always been at the forefront of driving this trend, offering key support including solutions such as enterprise applications (e.g., ERP, CRM) as well as Analytics, and database (e.g., In-Memory Computing) technology.

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From applications that are characterized by so called “social” features – to Social Business

December 9, 2011 by Sven Denecken

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks not only continue to grow in popularity, but they have also become symbols for a new generation of applications that are characterized by so called “social” features. Given the ever-increasing number of social networks – including the IT-giants Google and Microsoft recently announcing their own offerings – there certainly is a lot of buzz around  “Social Media” or the term “social” these days. We would like to call it simply social business.

At the same time, it clearly shows that there are some very powerful dynamics at play that significantly impact the industry, consumer as well as enterprise IT. In fact, at SAP – we believe that we are amidst industry change as social applications offer superior capabilities to have technology better support human social behavior.

What do we mean by that and what is SAP doing in this regards?

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Recruiting 2.0 in practice A point of view from the angle of a recruiter in a technology company – and a technology company as solution provider

September 30, 2011 by Sven Denecken

SAP has been using Social Media for recruiting pretty much since it’s inception, although admittedly at the beginning this was more on the initiative of individual recruiters rather than a focused strategy.

We are pleased that LinkedIn is investing in Germany this is a key hiring market for SAP, and we look forward to co-innovate and improve how this will complement existing Social Media capability in Germany and DACH.

As SAP is also invested in LinkedIn, we can be proud of the development LinkedIn did take – a potential we did see together on how to create value and transform industries through the LinkedIn platform. We made this investment because we believe that when social network and Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for companies and we do obviously look into the strategic opportunities going forward. Along those lines we are looking into what can be leveraged in solutions that we do provide to thousands of customers on global scale.

But let us start with SAP as a customer from LinkedIn first.

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Social Enterprise? Ok, but it is all about the people

September 28, 2011 by Sven Denecken

While we hear the “marketing” drum beating hefty around social enterprise (with 500 mio spend in bombarding the market with that message) we see social becoming close to mainstream. But Social, especially Social CRM has been around for a while and a lot of senior analysts have been seeing this topic for a while.

But is it really about social, social enterprise? No doubt, including experience from social networks, collaboration and new communication concepts like e.g. social media is needed, but this is already the case in the solutions that hit the light today. Some older offerings will need to bolt this on. But the key question is: will enterprises adopt? In the area of customer relationship management and “sales force automation” (which the later by the way is a bad term by itself as which sales force want´s to be automated?…) we have an ideal playground for this concepts to prosper and survive. But will other areas follow?

We think that there is one key element that most of vendors and most of the existing solutions are missing: you need to design the solutions from the employee up, not from the enterprise down.

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