So now its time for SAP to make its move and with this weeks announcement, SAP becomes a contender in the social software market. Now this didn’t just happen though, there’s a bit of a story to it, as one might expect. Earlier this year SAP signaled that it was getting serious about social by hiring well known social business expert Sameer Patel to head up its social business efforts as the Global VP and GM of social software solutions (DISCLAIMER: and also a friend). Sameer spent the better part of the last several years helping companies actually DO something with social business solutions, so he brings a wealth of real world experience to the position and the team. Since joining SAP he has gathered together a talented team and completely reworked SAP’s strategy and offerings, and I have to admit so far, I like what I’ve seen.
There are quite a few ESN solutions on the market today, and frankly most have similar features. They can operate as a system of relationship across the entire organization and offer employees a modern, clean and simple way to collaborate and connect to each other, and to data, content and systems. This approach, forming a new social layer, works fine for some employees and some roles, that is, moving collaboration and a lot of day to day communication into a new system. Some employees, particularly in some specific roles, roles that spend much of their time doing work inside an enterprise system, like customer service agents or AP/AR clerks, find it undesirable or inconvenient to add an new system for communication and collaboration that is separate from the system that occupies most of their daily activities. That’s why it’s necessary to provide the capability to embed the ESN into other enterprise systems to get the broad adoption that delivers the greatest value from the network.
While the current leading ESN’s have this capability it has always seem to me that the major enterprise vendors were in a unique position here, and could leverage the ESN most effectively through inserting it into the work flows inside its other enterprise systems. That’s exactly what SAP is doing with its new ESN product, SAP Jam.
SAP Jam, which is offered both on prem and in the cloud, is built to connect people (employees, partners, customers) to people, content and data in context to the enterprise work flow / process. Jam is enterprise ready, mobile (iPad app available now), secure, not silo’ed and in SAP terms “infused” across the rest of the SAP apps portfolio (phased in across the next few releases of course). The following diagram, provided by SAP, gives a good overview of the strategy:
The current roadmap, which is subject to change, provides social on-boarding and collaborative opportunity management in Q4 2012, along with several integrations including Sales OD, Finance OD, Social OD and CRM 7, as well as the Jam API. In the first half of 2013 SAP plans to add:
- Social Goal & Performance Management
- Collaborative Travel Planning
- Collaborative Contract Management
- Collaborative Call Center Support
along with a number of additional integrations, including an OpenSocial API.
SAP has come a long way in a very short period of time, and has some very aggressive plans in the coming months. The real proof is in the execution, so I’m anxious to see how the plans progress and to talk to some live customers once there’s a bit more experience with the new solutions. Based on what I’ve seen so far, SAP is definitely in the social business software game now, and has a good opportunity to provide significant value to its customers.