German enterprise software solutions provider SAP on Tuesday announced a slew of ‘experience management’ solutions aimed at helping businesses deliver improved customer, employee, product and brand experiences.
The move comes three months after the software giant completed an $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics — a U.S.-based experience management (XM) software provider. XM is the process of monitoring every interaction stakeholders have with a company in real time to spot the problems.
Speaking at the company’s Sapphire 2019 conference, it’s CEO Bill McDermott said till now businesses were dependent on operational data [O-data — numbers such as costs, accounting, and sales] for business decisions.
“But to understand why things happen, you need to understand the thoughts and emotions of the people involved.” This information is known as experience data (X-data).
The experience management software enable businesses to combine X-data and O-data to take business decision based on both facts and the intangibles.
New offerings
The 10 new offerings announced — four for customer experience, three for employee experience and three in market research — would embed experience data directly into an enterprise’s applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) or human capital management (HCM) systems.
Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, said, “... the companies that will win will be those who understand how X-data and O-data work together to tell the story of what is happening in an organisation, why it’s happening and how to act in real time to deliver breakthrough business results.”
On opportunities in India for XM, Mr. Smith said, “It’s early days.
“We obviously have some customers in India. But as far as taking on that market, we just accelerated that by five years by joining forces with SAP... And it’s not just India, but China, Latin America...”
Mr. McDermott added, “SAP has had a great experience with our customers and ecosystem in India. It’s a great country with tremendous innovation. We develop massive amounts of software in India, for India and the rest of the world. So it’s a big big deal.
“When you run businesses...time is either your best friend or your worst enemy. What we have is an opportunity to do with Qualtrics what we have done with all the M&A moves that we have done... We light the fuse globally at mass scale very quickly,” he added.
Separately, SAP also announced the extension of it’s partnership with Apple, under which Apple’s on-device machine learning technology (CORE ML) would be made available as part of former’s cloud platform software development kit, SDK.
The cloud platform SDK lets developers build and run iOS apps, powered by the SAP Cloud Platform and enterprise back-end data.
(The writer is in Orlando at the invitation of SAP)