On 5th June 2018, C/4HANA was unveiled to an unsuspecting group of SAP partners and customers in SAPPHIRE. Frankly, I was surprised. After the acquisition of Gigya and Callidus Cloud, there was an expectation of an improved Hybris maybe two years down the road. But this fast a turn-around? Seems like the digital DNA is finally seeping into SAP’s DNA and it is turning agile. This turns us to the most important question and subject of this blog:

 

What is C/4HANA?

 

C/4HANA can be defined in two ways. From a product perspective, it is the combination of four market-leading CRM products C4C, Hybris, Gigya and Callidus cloud.

 

C4C + Hybris + Gigya + Callidus Cloud = C/4HANA

 

 

From a functional perspective C/4HANA, handles sales, service, marketing, billing and customer data management.

 

C/4HANA = Sales + Service + Marketing + Billing + Customer Data Management

 

Of course, we shouldn’t forget SAP’s definition of the product as stated in it’s CRM homepage:

 

Experience the fourth generation of CRM. Built for emerging business models, SAP C/4HANA brings together customer data, machine learning and microservices technology to power real-time customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce and beyond

 

SAP has taken the best of breed CRM solutions and integrated it seamlessly into a single fourth Gen CRM. This brings us to the next question:

 

What exactly does C/4HANA offer?

 

To truly understand what C/4HANA is going to be, we need to understand the constituents in C/4HANA: C4C, Hybris, Gigya and Callidus Cloud.

 

  • Cloud4Customer (C4C): It is a SaaS platform for sales and service developed by SAP. It consists of two modules Cloud for sales and cloud for service, which was sold as two different packages by SAP.
  • Hybris: Hybris was a German firm acquired by SAP in 2013.  This solution provides enterprise Omnichannel and product content management software
  • Gigya: Gigya offers a customer identity management platform for managing profiles, preference, opt-in and consent settings. It is featured as a market leader in The Forrester Wave: Customer Identity And Access Management. It was acquired by SAP in 2017.
  • Callidus Cloud: Callidus offers sales effectiveness, sales performance management and Sales Execution (CPQ, CLM) software and services. Callidus is a Gartner Visionary in CPQ ( Cost Price Quotation ) and Gartner Market Leader in Sales Performance Management ( Incentives, Commission Management etc )

 

So by integrating the four, the following are the modules will be within C/4HANA’s scope:

 

  • Salesforce Automation
  • Sales Performance Management
  • Incentives and Commission Management
  • Cost Price Quotation
  • Contract Lifecycle management
  • Sales enablement and learning
  • Customer Engagement (Marketing)
  • Revenue and billing
  • E-Commerce
  • Product Content Management
  • Customer Identity Management

 

Who are C/4HANA’s competitors?

 

Hybris as an e-commerce platform found great success among the larger enterprises for SAP. But C4C did not do that well. Both functionality wise and from a cost and value perspective, it did not do well. Salesforce ate it’s lunch so to speak.

 

But with a myriad of best of breed applications integrated together SAP should stand out and make gains in this multi-billion dollar market provided the pricing is done just right and implementation costs are kept to a minimum.

 

What makes C/4HANA different from the current generation of CRMs?

 

The C/4HANA is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a classic example of when different best of breed products come together to create a coherent solution which provides more value than it’s constituent solutions standalone. A classic example of 1+1 = 3.  Given below are some of the innovations which make C/4HANA different from the current breed of CRM’s.

 

  • Built on HANA in-memory DB: This columnar database is a real changer when it comes to providing embedded analytics and real-time data inferences to the sales team on the go
  • Single source of truth: Since this is an end to end beyond CRM solution, the ability to get different data sets into one coherent location without duplication means that the sales and marketing team no longer has to spend time validating data.
  • Advanced AI and ML: Integration of Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning through HANA Vora and SAP Leonardo means improved analytics and insights leading to shorter sales cycles.

 

What’s next?

 

C/4HANA has just been announced. Information on licenses, pricing is yet to be known. Bookmark this page as we will be updating it as more and more information is shared on this product.