My previous blog CRM @ Teched 2010 Las Vegas discussed how those of us interested in SAP CRM could find content at SAP Teched 2010 Las Vegas. After attending SAP Teched last week, let’s take a look how my expectations for CRM content were met. I am breaking this into a three part series due to the length.
CRM in the unexpected places
Personal CRM @ teched
Part 1: CRM in unexpected places
Keynote
ALM242 Enhanced business blueprint
EIM 111: Impact of in-memory on business users
Hasso Plattner Institute Demo Pod
Keynote: Did SAP not get their memo about the signature design?
Vishal Sikka is always a great speaker and I always enjoying listening to his speeches and reading his blogs about the future of technology in the enterprise. The key themes of in memory, mobility and cloud computing were well illustrated. During the keynote I was shocked to see a demo involving a topic dear to my heart sales pipeline analytics. The demo started off with the trying to sell you Business Objects tools, but quickly switched to how the pipeline was populated. In front of 5000+ folks, there pops up my familiar CRM opportunity management data entry screens. However I immediately notice one major problem, they were using the CRM 52 theme instead of the SAP signature design. For 90% of the crowd that probably has never worked with SAP CRM this is a bad way to introduce the product. The CRM 52 design although much better than the old PCUI interface isn’t the best way to sell the system to your user base. It was sad to see a CRM 7.0 system not appear in front of that crowd with the awesome looking signature design that we love in CRM 2007 and beyond.
If you are wondering how I knew it was CRM 7.0 or higher, you can tell by the recent item work list and few other screen elements that don’t exist in the lower releases of the CRM webclient UI. Our lesson here is that SAP is telling us to use the signature design, then they need to use it their demos. For those of you thinking it’s a performance reason, honestly both themes are equally piggy in network bandwidth in loading up the mimes associated with the theme.
ALM242: Business Blueprinting for future
I have a ten-foot pole approach with solution manager at times. I only touch it when absolutely necessary. However keeping an open mind, I wanted to see what is this enhanced blueprint tool? For those of you who know me strictly from the CRM development forums, you may ask why I care about business blueprinting. Well I tend to be involved in a lot blueprinting work for my CRM projects. So I have a big interest in tools to better help document the blueprint into solution manager. It was interesting to see how the demo blueprints and some of the systems used once again were a CRM 5.0 system and some of the CRM processes that I’m familiar with. I didn’t expect CRM to be mentioned in this course and it showed up again. The actual tool discussed in the class looks like something I will want to use if and when SAP delivers the product.
EIM111: Fast People… I mean segmentation
I expected in this session to see yet another demo of the business objects explorer using the in memory acceleration. The session did not disappoint, however I was pleasantly surprised by a demo of high volume segmentation with CRM 7.0 using TREX. The demo was impressive as the segment builder in CRM is not traditionally known for its speed. It lead me to start thinking of future memory accelerated business scenarios for CRM. It was nice to see an example of how closer to core SAP functionality can be improved by the promise of in-memory technology
Hasso Plattner Institute Demo Pod: Find a way to get most money while annoying the least amount of customers
Teched this year was like seeing a plague of iPads. I think that if Steve Jobs attended he would be pleased how SAP acts as his best channel partner for iPad sales. I personally tried stumping the experts at Hasso Plattner Institute on whether there were any scenarios that couldn’t be improved with in-memory computing. After much prodding, the answer was a polite “Nicht” to my question. They did however show me this great demo on the iPad of supply chain planning. Basically you could decide who get what orders first and the cost/benefit analysis of doing so. The cool part was you could re-order the sequence in realtime and get an immediate result. It’s not a “true” CRM system piece, but important in helping to manage our relationships with our customers and finding a way to make the most amount of money while annoying the least amount of our customer base.
Part 1 Wrapup
It was amazing at how much SAP CRM related content appeared in places that I didn't expect it. It was like someone knew that I was attending all these sessions and made sure to include a CRM example to keep me happy and engaged.
