Is acquisition tableau by Salesforce, will impact growth of SAP ?
Salesforce is No.1 CRM company in the world, according to market share is concerned by offering world class customer relationship management software which helps companies better manage customer data and information, which, in turn, helps those companies to better serve their customers and increase sales. Whereas, Tableau is one of the fastest growing analytics platform providers in the world. Their software products allow a broad population of business users to engage with their data, ask questions, solve problems, and create value. How Salesforce’s Tableau acquisition will impact IT and the deal is good news for Salesforce.com users.
The acquisition of Tableau will potentially increase Salesforce’s revenue to more than $24 billion by the Financial Year of 2022. As the acquisition will be completed at the end of Q3 2020 (ended October 2019). The acquisition of Tableau will increase its revenues to $24+ Billion in the next three years. Salesforce customers who don’t yet use Tableau have the most to gain from the acquisition and Salesforce based out of San Francisco wants to let Tableau continue operating independently from its existing Seattle headquarters.
The growth is witnessing with the adoption of technology is quiet advancing and the rate of adoption depends on many factors other than technology like, technical feasibility, costs of human labour, and cost of deploying solution may delay adoption of automation technology. But in the long run deployment of automation technologies could bring lots of benefits for companies. Digital Transformation across the industrial space is focusing on processes and seeing the real value capture of I-IoT.
A question arises at the board level of discussions, what SAP CRM offers that Salesforce does not offer. That is like comparing apples with oranges. SAP CRM was mostly an on premise system until a year back, a software was required to run the CRM whereas Salesforce is a SaaS based CRM, it does not need a software. Now that SAP offers a SaaS based CRM, Now, a question comes on with the acquisition of tableau by Salesforce, how Salesforce CRM with SAP CRM will face the competition in front of the customer.
Salesforce was an early mover in the cloud CRM space, almost 15 years old, in contrast SAP forayed into cloud space in the last 2 to 3 years. That gives an advantage to Salesforce, they have built a full suite of CRM solutions on the cloud during these years. Salesforce has also acquired companies to build the solutions where they were lagging – for example marketing. However, SAP has made a rapid progress in terms of making available of the functionalities in its cloud based CRM. More than 50% of SAP CRM on premise functionalities are now available in the cloud, and in the next quarters most of the on premise functionalities will be available in the cloud. Let’s compare the functionalities available in both the CRM.
CRM for Sales - both the cloud based CRM offers almost similar pre sales features. Features such as leads, Opportunities, activities etc. are similar in both the CRM, except that SAP Cloud for Customer has an upper hand if customers look for an end to end sales solution with an integrated SAPERP system. SAP Cloud for Customer can be easily integrated with an on premise SAP ERP/CRM, the middleware is already available for SAP cloud for customer. For Salesforce, the adapters have to be built for integrating. It will be a challenge to integrate Salesforce with an SAP ERP with moderate to heavy customizing. Pricing will be another challenge for integrating a Salesforce application to SAP ERP pricing. As most of the customers use an ERP for their ordering and logistics, using an integrated Salesforce might be a challenge. Salesforce is better placed in social selling than SAP cloud for customer. Many has felt that Salesforce has a slightly better user interface than SAP cloud for customer, and configuring the solution – formulas, routines, exceptions etc. are bit easier in Salesforce.
CRM for Marketing –Salesforce was lagging in marketing solution until they acquired Exacttarget.com, a cloud based marketing solution company. Salesforce has fortified its marketing cloud offering since then. The offerings around social media marketing, email and mobile marketing, marketing automation tool etc. are really nice. But if you are looking at an end to end marketing solution then SAP should be a better choice, only issue with SAP is that the user experience is not that great, though it has improved drastically in the cloud for customer. Salesforce still offers better user experience and better integration capability with other cloud based CRM. SAP can be a better choice if you use complex segmentation around your transactional data, integration with SAP BW can be very challenging when using Salesforce. Budget planning, tracking marketing spending, funds management & tracking campaign ROI are additional super advantages of an SAP based system.
CRM for service – SAP clearly has a big advantage over Salesforce on this functionality. I saw a service cloud demo offered by Salesforce, which looked to me as a help desk solution. It does not offer rich functionality that SAP offers. SAP offers a whole range of solution in customer service – work order management, parts allocation, warranty & claims, contracts, an integrated billing, and so many advanced features that clearly distinguishes it from Salesforce as well as other CRM vendors. SAP’s call center solution is excellent, better than Salesforce.
CRM Analytics – SAP is a standout performer in analytics. Most of the customer with whom I have interacted, they mostly liked the analytics part in the cloud. Cloud for Customer can be easily integrated with BI and BO for richer analytics. After SAP acquired KXEN, the predictive analysis tool offered by SAP has become very powerful.
Salesforce.com’s $15.7 billion bid for Tableau Software has many organizations wondering on how the proposed acquisition will impact their operations. The answer is the businesses have historically turned to companies such as Tableau. Its data analytics and visualization software was built to run on-premises, but enterprises are increasingly deploying Tableau Server in Amazon’s, Google’s or Microsoft’s clouds, and a growing number are adopting the SaaS version, Tableau Online.
Lastly, the business intelligence market is commoditized, with CIOs selecting largely on price. Forrester’s Evelson has seen Microsoft charging under $4 per user per month for BI in large enterprise deals, and Oracle under $5 in very large enterprise deals. If you’re an independent BI vendor and that’s your only source of revenue, you can’t do that.
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