Analytics

SAP has ushered in a new era in the way consumers and enterprises interact with each other. Just three months after completing its acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP has rolled out 10 new offerings that combine experience data with operational data to measure and improve the four core experiences of business — customer, employee, product and brand. The rollout of this system sets a new standard in enterprise software.

The combination enables organizations to continuously listen to the beliefs, emotions and intentions of customers, employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. These new offerings — four for customer experience (CX), three for employee experience and three in market research — embed X-data directly into an enterprise’s applications, such as its CRM, ERP or HCM systems, to drive continuous action and improvement.

“We want everyone to remember their Xs and Os,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott at the company’s 30th annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference. “Experience Management is the new frontier for the world’s best-run businesses. I have never seen SAP more fired up to help our customers be a driving force for growth, innovation and optimism.”

Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, said: “We live in the experience economy where organizations are either intentionally racing to the top or unknowingly racing to the bottom. The difference between the companies that will win is they understand how X-data and O-data work together to tell the story of what is happening in an organization, why it’s happening and how to act in real time to deliver breakthrough business results.”

These new SAP offerings provide organizations with an end-to-end XM platform that uses X-data and O-data. As a result, organizations can:

Centralize X-data from customers, employees or any other stakeholder at every meaningful touchpoint on a single, enterprise-wide system. This makes it simple for organizations to listen.
Connect X-data to the operations and processes of their business to understand why things are happening, spot hidden trends and then automatically make recommendations to help correct what doesn’t work and magnify what does.
Act, which leads to customers who stay longer, buy more and share with friends; and employees who deliver more, build a positive culture and advocate for their brand.

For customer experience, SAP has introduced Experience Management to the SAP C/4HANA suite, creating powerful cloud solutions for sales, marketing, commerce and service experience management. This provides an end-to-end customer experience platform in the industry, allowing organizations to listen, understand and act on insights that will drive purchasing decisions and customer loyalty.

For employee experience, SAP has introduced three Experience Management solutions that transform existing HR platforms into enterprise-wide systems of action. Built directly into existing HR systems, the solutions gather experience data from employees throughout the employee lifecycle and empower HR leaders and managers to listen, understand and act on insights that will attract, engage and retain a world-class workforce.

SAP Expands App Portfolio on Both iOS and Mac®

Today at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP and Apple announced that CORE ML®, Apple’s on-device machine learning technology, will be available for the first time as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. The next version of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month, enables businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. Machine learning models will automatically download to iPhone® and iPad® so apps can run offline, and then dynamically update while connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

Through the partnership with Apple, SAP has rebuilt its most popular mobile apps for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions, along with SAP Asset Manager, to run natively on iOS. These apps are fully integrated with iPhone and iPad, to maximize security, performance and the latest platform innovations from Apple. SAP today announced it will expand its native iOS experience across its broader applications portfolio, starting with SAP Ariba solutions.

Building on the success of its iOS efforts, SAP also announced it will expand its app offerings to the Mac, with new apps that match the power and ease of use of SAP iOS apps. The new native Mac apps will bring the richness of the SAP iOS experience to the desktop world.

“Apple is on the rise in the enterprise,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “Our customers love the unmatched security and ease of use iOS is known for, and that it gives them a superior platform to build game-changing business apps. We have a strong partnership, and today’s announcements show SAP’s commitment to continue our innovation with Apple.”

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said: “Enterprise customers are seeing real business benefits when they use iOS. We are excited for SAP to extend these experiences further on iPhone and iPad, as well as bringing them to the Mac for the first time. This is an important milestone for our partnership, and we are thrilled to be working together with SAP to empower our customers with the world’s most-trusted business process data on iPhone, iPad and Mac — the best devices for business.”