News
SAP Offers CRM 2007
- By Barbara Darrow
- December 4, 2007
SAP today showed off its latest customer relationship management (CRM) wares, which was recast with Web 2.0-type support.
SAP CRM 2007, available in both on-demand and on-premises incarnations, was demonstrated today at the SAP Influencer event in Boston.
The offering, which will be available this month, sports a simple, white-screened Google-like interface to which users or developers can add mashups from the world beyond CRM.
Users can drag and drop on-screen elements around their screen to suit their tastes, and the UI can be as complex and busy or as spare as the user dictates.
SAP's CRM Chief, Bob Stutz, said this capability represents a big UI improvement over the last release.
"[CRM] 2006 was more of a beta release to get more customers on and get more feedback, find out what's missing, what we needed to do. [CRM] 2007 is a pretty radically different UI. It has the ability to do things like add mashups. It's quick, simple and fast. In 2006, nothing was drag-and-drop," Stutz, senior vice president, CRM Global Strategy & Product Development, told reporters at the Boston event.
SAP is clearly trying to compete with the Web 2.0-like interfaces sported by Salesforce.com and Net Suite. This release is based on SAP's Net Weaver foundation, meaning that corporate developers can parlay Net weaver skills from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) realm here.
There is some question about the degree to which SAP's CRM is dependent on sales and adoption of the company's market-leading ERP suite. Company officials admit that ERP is the cargo ship that carries CRM to market.
One large SAP customer painted that dependency in positive terms.
"If you don't have the ERP and the other connections you need, what you really have is SFA [Sales Force Automation], and as a sales manager that's a limited battle. It's a great place to start but not a great place to finish," said David MaCauley, senior vice president, CRM for Sales Transformation, at Siemens. Siemens is one of SAP's largest customers.
"A salesman has questions and wants answers without having to care where they reside," he added
MaCauley noted that Siemens currently uses a raft of CRM products, including Salesforce.com, Siebel and others, but is standardizing on SAP CRM.
CRM 2007 is part of SAP's enterprise business suite. The company also offers suites for small and midsize businesses.
About the Author
Barbara Darrow is RDN’s industry editor.