SAP has announced its latest iteration of its CRM suite, which includes a hosted, on demand model that claims an optimized user interface using Web 2.0 technologies. I was curious to know what the software giant had came up with; SAP and Web 2.0 in the same sentence — that had to be worth at least a few minutes of investigation.
My first criticism is the lack of any true, interactive demo. Web videos (registration required) demonstrating the product were the only tools available for previewing the product. (Other on demand CRM products, namely Salesforce.com and NetSuite, offer free trials in addition to complementary online videos.)
The demo videos are structured to show the perspectives of how SAP CRM can be used by a Sales Rep, a Sales Manager and a Marketing Manager. Without getting into too much depth, the videos focused on showing a few specific examples of usage, such as adjusting a sales target and qualifying a sales lead. While the examples are intentionally simplistic, the real question is: how much effort is required to configure the product, and what is the flexibility to customize to meet one’s unique business requirements? SAP is careful not to include any videos of how the system is configured, nor any glimpses of its customization capabilities.
There is also little evidence of “Web 2.o”. It’s possible, although difficult to see via web video, if SAP CRM is using AJAX to do things like minimize page refreshing. I didn’t see any examples of in-line field editing. From a social computing perspective, there was no mention of integration opportunities with popular social networking frameworks like Facebook or LinkedIn (a la FaceForce), nor any mention of an ability to enable collaboration with partners or vendors (I’m thinking of Salesforce-to-Salesforce here). In other words, the ability to securely share (configurable) access to customer information with 3rd parties.
I had also read, via this Reuters article, that SAP CRM 2007 would come with support out of the box for the iPhone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any reference to the iPhone on SAP’s own website. Inputting “iPhone” into their search tool currently returns zero results.
SAP CRM 2007 has only become available in the last week, so it may be a while before we start to hear about real experiences configuring and using it.
Filed under: CRM
