The new co-CEOs of SAP plan to create “micro suites” of offerings by leveraging ongoing research and development in integration technologies across its cloud applications portfolio.
At a Capital Markets event, Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein described how Qualtrics, an online survey platform, will be more tightly integrated with SAP SuccessFactors, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for managing human resources within the context of a micro suite.
Similarly, SAP plans to more tightly integrate the SAP Ariba purchasing network with the SAP Concur travel expense management application.
The goal is to increase revenue by expanding adoption of SAP offerings among existing SAP customers, says Morgan. The co-CEOs noted, for example, 75% of the customers running Concur today don’t run SAP ERP applications.
“We’re going to engage our customers at the point of interaction,” says Morgan.
However, Morgan also says SAP is working toward eliminating the need to have salespeople sell applications. Instead, the entire purchasing process will become automated, says Morgan.
In addition, Morgan pledged to drive more organic growth and reduce the redundancies and silos that make it challenging for customers and partners to sometimes engage SAP. As part of that effort, Morgan says over time SAP will also be moving to divest in areas where there is overlap between its product offerings.
Finally, Morgan says SAP also plans to leverage cloud service providers such as Microsoft as distributors of its applications.
Clearly, SAP is trying to leverage investments in acquisitions of SaaS applications to drive adoption of SAP s/4 applications running on its HANA databases in the cloud. SAP claims by the end of this quarter there will be more than 2,000 customers running S/4 applications. The challenge SAP faces is many more customers are still running legacy R/3 applications on other databases that they appear to be in no hurry to upgrade.
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