SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) - What's in it for SAP CRM Consultants

SAP's Cloud for Customer (C4C) is making its presence felt in the CRM market with its inbuilt integration to SAP

CRM, ECC and several other Third party applications. This also raises the following questions in the minds of

customers and CRM consultants alike.

What kind of features are Customers looking for in C4C?

What does this mean to the SAP CRM consultants and their future?

Will there be needs to customize the C4C?

What will be the needs to integrate SAP CRM with SAP C4C?

What will the CRM landscape look like?

 

Let us start by looking into the history of SAP and its CRM efforts in the past. SAP has been looking to get into the

CRM space since 1995 and the real push came with the acquisition of a German Salesforce Automation company

Kiefer & Viettinger with its development center in Bangalore. This became a precursor to what we know as SAP CRM

On premise solution today. SAP had to come up with an On-Demand (The old term for today's cloud) offering to

counter Salesforce.com which was picking pace in 2007-2008. This Customer On Demand (CoD) which comprised of

Sales On Demand, Service On Demand and later Social On Demand evolved into what we now know as SAP Cloud

for Customer.

SAP Cloud for customer is much more complete, robust and mature solution than its predecessors. It comes with

prepackaged integrations to SAP ERP and SAP CRM, Mobile interfaces, strong social features. The entire product

can be seen as a combination of a browser based Silverlight UI, Integrated social features of JAM, Set of rich Mobile

apps for iOS & Android, SAP HANA for Integration scenarios. SAP PI can also be a choice for Integration which we

will discuss later.

The overall architecture of SAP C4C is that of a multi-tenant architecture which means that the SAP C4C and the

Integration component itself is shared with other customers. There is also a single-tenant model for customers which

is a private edition for additional cost. The multi-tenant model means that whenever SAP upgrades or releases a

patch it might overwrite some of the custom solutions built on top of the SAP C4C solution. This is the most common

concern of customers going on a multi-tenant model. While the cloud solutions push for standardization customers

will still need their industry specific and company specific modifications in place. SAP need not look far behind than

this classic Hasso vs Marc Benioff debate as this was THE point SAP had against SFDC.

SAP Provides 2 options to Integrate SAP C4C with SAP CRM on Premise and SAP ERP. 

1. SAP PI/PO - Recommended if you already have SAP PI/PO and prefer to have Integration On-Premise

2. SAP HANA Cloud Integration - Recommended if you are not using SAP PI and have more Cloud to Cloud

Integration

More details in this document here.

 

The solution options and different deployment models give rise to interesting architecture questions for SAP

Customers.

   

On-Premise only - We already have SAP CRM on Premise. Why do we need SAP C4C       

Cloud only - Do we discard the On Premise Solution and go for SAP C4C

Private Cloud - Do we get a private edition of SAP C4C

Hybrid - Do we use SAP C4C in addition to the already existing SAP CRM On premise solution

On-Premise only - Some of the choices the CRM customers today look for are modern & easy to use UI for Sales

people, Browser based access, Mobile access - Online & Offline scenarios. SAP CRM already provides a Browser

based UI however the Mobile access is something that the customer will need to choose from a limited choice of

apps and take the burden of device choice as well as deployment. Customers who have heavily customized their

SAP CRM to suit the processes or use deep Marketing and Service functionalities and do not have a End user case

for going to cloud would prefer to keep their solution On-Premise only.

 

Cloud Only - SAP C4C alone would suffice if the customer is looking for a light weight solution with standard CRM

processes like Activities and opportunities. The integration choices need to be considered for which system would be

the leading system and which ERP integrations are most needed for the field force.

SAP C4C could also be an excellent candidate for replacing non SAP CRM solutions in SAP ERP customers for

better integration and more unified architecture.

 

Private Cloud - If customers have high needs for customization within the cloud solutions and would not want SAP

C4C upgrades and patches to be impacted then would prefer this solution. This solution is as good as having an On

Premise solution albeit on SAP C4C and not SAP CRM.

 

Hybrid - This solution will have both SAP CRM and SAP C4C co-existing in the CRM landscape. This is of the most

interest to SAP CRM consultants from the following point of view

What will the end architecture look like?

What processes should stay On Premise and what processes on Cloud? Would it be prudent to

customize both?

What about reporting - Will the reporting mirror the process choices? Will Cloud processes reports

available only on cloud or should they be in On Premise BI

 

A simplified and representative architecture diagram with all the CRM and Related components is shown below. The

most common system components of a Hybrid CRM solution are given below along with representative integrations.

From a CRM consultant point of view there are decisions to be made on Integrations, leading systems for Master

data and Transaction data, On the run Reporting and historical reporting, volume of transactions that need to be flow

between separate systems.

The C4C integration to CRM On premise could be on the basis of level of customization required, whether the

functionality is required to be on the cloud/on the field, what are the master data governance rules within the

company, Sales organization structure.

Ex: The frontline sales team will generate opportunities on the move with very minimal information (The Top 5 -

Customer, Product, Opportunity Phase, Value, and Volume) and the sales assistants in the back-office will enhance

the opportunities with more data that are replicated to the On-premise solution.

 

The C4C integration to ERP could be on the basis of types of transactions needed to be displayed to the front end

sales like Orders, Quotations or contracts. Based on the role of the Sales person whether they need pricing

information, availability checks or even customer credit information. The principle here could be that of only deploying

a "Must Have" Integration with the ERP transactions.

 

Reporting - The C4C Sales analytics provides standard set of reports and dashboards for the day to day use of a

Sales representative. These analytics is real time and can be integrated with the BW Data warehouse. The standard

architecture should suffice for most needs although there might be some BW reporting key figures needed on the

Sales Analytics dashboards based on the business needs.

 

Although we cannot go into each and every choice in this blog post one cardinal rule of CRM is that it should give a

complete historical and current view of the customer to the Salesperson/Account manager representing that

customer. All the architecture and integration decisions should be based on this principle to keep the solution useful

for the End user.

Hello Nithin, Nice write up! Three REALLY IMPORTANT corrections:  CORRECTION #1

You wrote:

The overall architecture of SAP C4C is that of a multi-tenant architecture which means that the SAP C4C and the Integration component itself is shared with other customers.

 There isn't an "integration component" specific to SAP Cloud for Customer. The multi-tenant environment doesn't spontaneously force all customers to move to a new method of integration.

The integration services in SAP Cloud for Customer are basically Enterprise Services. These Enterprise Services are versioned and managed as part of a Services Oriented Architecture in the exact way that enterprise services are managed with the SAP NetWeaver technology stack for SAP's on - premise solutions. Any future deprecation of an interface is documented in the "what's new" with each release. There will be a period of time when two versions of the interface will be available (I can't remember the exact duration, but it is on a scale of many months). So yes, there will be a drop dead date where the old version of the interface will no longer be supported and all calls to that interface will fail.

BENEFIT: When SAP Cloud for Customer is integrated with any external system (SAP and/or non-SAP systems), because two versions of the interface are available at the same time, customers can plan, make adjustments, test the adjustments against QA systems, etc. Each customer in a multi-tenant environment can move to the new version of the interface at a time and pace that makes sense for them. 

CORRECTION #2

You wrote:The multi-tenant model means that whenever SAP upgrades or releases a patch it might overwrite some of the custom solutions built on top of the SAP C4C solution.

 Each upgrade or release does NOT overwrite any customers' custom solutions or extensions on top of C4C.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Without requiring the SDK, each tenant is highly configured to match the very specific fingerprint of each customer's organization. This configuration is called a solution profile. The tenant profile is managed by the strong lifecycle management backbone. The tenant profile includes not only the business configuration choices, but also all the extensibility adaptations that have been made. Extensibility adaptations include:

Company specific documentation on a global or per-"ui page" basis

Output form customizations based on customer, market segment, or master layouts,

Custom analytics,

Custom KPI's,

UI mashups

Web service scenarios and communication arrangements, Custom fields, and New data object definitions

 The last two bullet points are extremely interesting because this allows a customer to extend the definition of existing data objects or create brand new data objects, without involving a developer. Custom fields can be added to screens, control visibility of data in other fields, added to the enterprise search results, embedded on output forms (e.g., visit reports), utilized as characteristics in the analytics engine, and dynamically enhance the web service(s) defined for existing data objects. A great example has been published on YouTube, demonstrating the addition of a custom field to a screen. This same concept was then further demonstrated in another video where the custom field was made available to analytics. The tenant can then be hyper-configured by the customers' administrators to create unique Business Roles. When users are registered in the tenant, they are assigned one or more of the business roles. A business role defines:

Which features are available to the users assigned to the business role,

What data can the user see,

scope of data can they create or change, The type of a page layout they see. Customers' administrators can define their own page

layouts to control the arrangement, visibility, read-only status, and mandatory state for fields on the page. A very brief look at these page layouts is seen in the 1408 "what's new" video segment. More information on this and all tht extensibility topics can be seen in the SAP Cloud for Customer Administrators Guide in the section entitled Administrator Adaptation Quick Guide (HTML5).

BENEFIT: To be clear, all of the above extensibility topics are implemented using the built-in web-based key user tools. No developers need to be involved. If customers or partners need to utilize the SAP Cloud Applications Studio (the SDK), the studio allows them to work with the same entities that SAP uses in the core development of its cloud solutions and to develop solution capabilities that have the same look and feel as the SAP standard cloud solutions.

BENEFIT: Because the SAP Cloud Applications Studio (SDK) is deeply integrated with the SAP cloud solution, it provides a strong lifecycle management backbone that supports the long life of each customers' solution. The studio supports the development of solution capabilities that are tailored for specific customers. The development and deployment of these solution capabilities causes no disruption to daily business because the upload process of a solution to a customer's production system does not require any system downtime.  CORRECTION #3You wrote:There is also a single-tenant model for customers which is a private edition for additional cost.

Private edition is not limited to a single tenant.Some customers require their data to be segregated to separate physical hardware. The Private Edition is an optional service and includes a dedicated multi-tenant system for single customer usage and customized maintenance windows.

BENEFIT: A customer may elect to have up to 10 production tenants on a Private Edition system (independent of the count of DEV, QA, TEST cloud tenants in their landscape) and a customized maintenance window.

Best,Greg RootSenior Technology Advisor