Event
Summary
"CRM
will become our major driver for business revenue," SAP chairman Hasso Plattner
said on November 9 at a briefing on SAP's front-office strategy. It is a heady
statement for the company, whose forays into CRM over the past year have been
troubled at best, with significant delays in application delivery. Yet the company
has stated that it would be rolling out its crucial front-office components
next month, and will round out its basic CRM suite by early next year. On Dec.
15, the company will ship a telesales application, as well an Internet portal
that pulls customer information from multiple sources, including R/3 systems
and third-party applications. But a marketing-campaign management application,
also expected this year, will not ship until the second quarter of 2000. Plattner,
while hesitating to put an official number on the company's planned growth in
the front-office market, said he believed it would hit $200 million in CRM revenue
and related products. He added that this was a conservative estimate. "The market
will continue to grow", he said, "because while most businesses have operational
transactions well in hand, they are only now learning to use technology to serve
and sell to customers".
Market
Impact
SAP
has long been remiss in addressing and delivering its CRM product line, and
has faced a difficult internal dilemma. It could fully integrate its internally
developed CRM modules with its R/3 ERP system and risk the possibility of losing
customers to quicker-to-market ERP competitors or CRM niche players, or it could
jump on the bandwagon and hastily deliver suboptimal CRM functionality. The
Company opted for the first alternative by following its corporate culture and
bidding on its customers' loyalty. SAP is significantly late to market with
its recent CRM announcement, and trails Siebel and Oracle in the offered functionality
scope.
User
Recommendations
We
believe that SAP is slowly moving in the right direction, and has huge financial,
sales and personnel resources to throw at the problem. Nevertheless, users are
advised to consider both product maturity and functionality in their evaluations
and make comparisons to competitive offerings.