Understanding your customers and having the tools to build a seamless customer experience is what every business needs. This ambitious goal requires bridging the gap between your customers, your teams, and the technology. SAP provides a single solution by offering the most comprehensive suite on the market to do just that. According to major analyst reports, SAP is the only vendor that leads across sales, marketing, commerce, and customer data management. Today, over 1,500 customers are committed to the vision of SAP C/4HANA, which now also includes Qualtrics. The suite delivers the full experience and engages customers through a real conversation.
Over the past year – since we announced SAP C/4HANA – we have been busy doing many things:
We are seeing how our cloud customers rapidly adopt these innovations and enjoy the 5-star treatment from SAP. That is the beauty of the cloud model!
To enjoy a great customer experience, the customer expects consistent interaction regardless of the touchpoint or channel. This requires a holistic view of the customers and their transactions, such as purchases, attributes activities, interests, affinities, etc. This is what we are building into our unified Customer Experience profile. It builds on and ties closely into a common set of master data services, like the Business Partner MDM service, that are required for a suite. And not just for SAP C/4HANA, we are working together with many other SAP teams as part of the Intelligent Enterprise Suite program to unify a common set of master data services like Customer, Product, Order, Service Tickets, etc. The first one, set to be launched in Q3, is the Customer Master Service.
For developers, customers, or ISV partners, this means that you can access the core customer information whenever it is needed, simply by calling one standard common API, irrespective of the number of SAP applications and data locations in place. To access data through the API layer, it is critical that the data is stored in one place and that we expose a curated API with consistent qualities across all master data objects. More information about this upcoming service called SAP Graph will become available as we approach the second half of the year.
To achieve a common suite experience based on one platform, we offer a set of platform services that standardize key infrastructural capabilities, such as user management, single-sign-on, monitoring, inbox, collaboration services powered by Ruum, etc. They, too, are built in accordance with the Intelligent Enterprise Suite program.
As we are moving from a set of individual monolithic cloud applications to a suite a of microservice-based capabilities on a common platform, it is also important that we have a common extensibility environment and approach. For this purpose, we have extended SAP Cloud Platform with SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory to enable stitching together sets of heterogenous technology stacks into one common extensibility model. You, our partners and customers, can now build extensions and customizations in a microservice-based or serverless environment accessing the five SAP C/4HANA cloud solutions through a common set of APIs and events.
Very importantly, we believe that to win the market, SAP C/4HANA needs to significantly grow its ecosystem. That is why we have open-sourced the whole extensibility model via Project Kyma: We are forging an open approach, so you can mix and match capabilities and services via a common service mesh and service broker. We have also doubled down on the idea of openness via the Open Data Initiative (ODI). This makes SAP C/4HANA ready for an open future in which key data entities such as customer, product, order, and many more can be exchanged through a standardized, common data model across all ODI consortium partners.
Today, compelling customer experiences need to go far beyond great usability on one touchpoint: They need to reach into your enterprise and supply chain end-to-end to ensure you are keeping the promise to your customer.
To give you an example, 80% of consumers today prefer fast availability of a product to ordering their favorite brand with a longer shipping time. It means that to deliver a great experience and to keep the promise of excellence to your customers at any point of interaction, you need to tap both into your core systems and into the supply chain to ensure you can deliver on your promise in time.
By offering end-to-end process integration, we are delivering SAP’s key value proposition of an integrated suite of products – like only SAP can do.
Now, it becomes reality.
When I think about the last 12 months, it is incredible what we have achieved and how far we have come in such a short time. We now have the most agile and integrated customer experience suite on the market.
Be a CX leader yourself with SAP C/4HANA!
Over the past year – since we announced SAP C/4HANA – we have been busy doing many things:
- Accelerating innovation by launching SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory (based on open-source project Kyma)
- Optimizing administrator and developer access to the suite with SAP C/4HANA Foundation at no additional charge
- Forging openness through the Open Data Initiative
- Making key end-to-end portfolio integrations, e.g. Callidus
- Introducing new products like SAP Upscale Commerce
- Delivering 50+ AI use cases
We are seeing how our cloud customers rapidly adopt these innovations and enjoy the 5-star treatment from SAP. That is the beauty of the cloud model!
Consistency across the board with Master Data Services
To enjoy a great customer experience, the customer expects consistent interaction regardless of the touchpoint or channel. This requires a holistic view of the customers and their transactions, such as purchases, attributes activities, interests, affinities, etc. This is what we are building into our unified Customer Experience profile. It builds on and ties closely into a common set of master data services, like the Business Partner MDM service, that are required for a suite. And not just for SAP C/4HANA, we are working together with many other SAP teams as part of the Intelligent Enterprise Suite program to unify a common set of master data services like Customer, Product, Order, Service Tickets, etc. The first one, set to be launched in Q3, is the Customer Master Service.
For developers, customers, or ISV partners, this means that you can access the core customer information whenever it is needed, simply by calling one standard common API, irrespective of the number of SAP applications and data locations in place. To access data through the API layer, it is critical that the data is stored in one place and that we expose a curated API with consistent qualities across all master data objects. More information about this upcoming service called SAP Graph will become available as we approach the second half of the year.
Shared platform services, shared experience
To achieve a common suite experience based on one platform, we offer a set of platform services that standardize key infrastructural capabilities, such as user management, single-sign-on, monitoring, inbox, collaboration services powered by Ruum, etc. They, too, are built in accordance with the Intelligent Enterprise Suite program.
As we are moving from a set of individual monolithic cloud applications to a suite a of microservice-based capabilities on a common platform, it is also important that we have a common extensibility environment and approach. For this purpose, we have extended SAP Cloud Platform with SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory to enable stitching together sets of heterogenous technology stacks into one common extensibility model. You, our partners and customers, can now build extensions and customizations in a microservice-based or serverless environment accessing the five SAP C/4HANA cloud solutions through a common set of APIs and events.
Openness is key for our ecosystem
Very importantly, we believe that to win the market, SAP C/4HANA needs to significantly grow its ecosystem. That is why we have open-sourced the whole extensibility model via Project Kyma: We are forging an open approach, so you can mix and match capabilities and services via a common service mesh and service broker. We have also doubled down on the idea of openness via the Open Data Initiative (ODI). This makes SAP C/4HANA ready for an open future in which key data entities such as customer, product, order, and many more can be exchanged through a standardized, common data model across all ODI consortium partners.
Make the promise, keep the promise
Today, compelling customer experiences need to go far beyond great usability on one touchpoint: They need to reach into your enterprise and supply chain end-to-end to ensure you are keeping the promise to your customer.
To give you an example, 80% of consumers today prefer fast availability of a product to ordering their favorite brand with a longer shipping time. It means that to deliver a great experience and to keep the promise of excellence to your customers at any point of interaction, you need to tap both into your core systems and into the supply chain to ensure you can deliver on your promise in time.
By offering end-to-end process integration, we are delivering SAP’s key value proposition of an integrated suite of products – like only SAP can do.
Now, it becomes reality.
When I think about the last 12 months, it is incredible what we have achieved and how far we have come in such a short time. We now have the most agile and integrated customer experience suite on the market.
Be a CX leader yourself with SAP C/4HANA!
Further blog posts:
- Introducing SAP C/4HANA Foundation
- SAP C/4HANA Foundation: This is where we take it from here
- Extending SAP Partnerships with SAP C/4HANA Foundation
- SAP C/4HANA Extensibility: SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, Kyma, Price and Support
- Now available – The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory
Additional information:
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