In the last 18 months or so, growing adoption of cloud-based CRM and declining

adoption of on-premise CRM have made people involved with SAP CRM bit concerned.
Though SAP has moved many of its on-premise CRM functionalities to cloud for
customer. Still many of the SAP customers use on-premise SAP CRM. CRM
Consultants, CRM users and partners are still not clear, what is in store? Consultants
are concerned because they don't know if their on-premise skills will remain relevant in
the future. CRM users are concerned because, if their management decides to move
everything from on-premise to cloud, they will have to learn and apply new skills,
Partners are concerned because they don't know in which of the areas they will have to
train their people. I thought of writing this post for all the people who are involved in
CRM to have some clarity.
The interesting trend continuing into 2015 is deployment of Cloud based CRM. We are
certainly seeing CRM deployment moving away from on-premise to cloud-based
platform. Gartner predicts that the percentage of companies with cloud CRM
deployments will rise above 50% in 2015. Gartner also says that CRM leads all
enterprise software categories in terms of projected growth, showing a 15.1% CAGR
from 2012 to 2017. In the latest IT spending outlook for 2015, Gartner predicts In the
enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $335 billion, a 5.5 percent
increase from 2014. More price erosion and vendor consolidation are expected in 2015
because of fierce competition between cloud and on-premises software providers. In
particular, in the customer relationship management (CRM) market, a key cloud
battleground, seat prices for segments such as sales force automation (SFA) are
expected to decline by 25 percent through 2018. This will be caused by incumbent onpremises vendors discounting their cloud offerings heavily to try and maintain their
customer base. So how does it affect people who are involved in CRM consultants,
users of SAP CRM, implementation partners and so on?
If we deep dive into the reports published by Gartner, Forrester, Hfs Research etc., we
see that each one in its report has mentioned SAP CRM either in its Leaders quadrant
or in its winners circle. Interestingly, all of them have mentioned both of the CRM
offerings by SAP on-premise and Cloud for Customer. SAP CRM has also made it into
2015 CRM Watchlist winners circle published by Paul Greenberg. Paul Greenberg
writes one of the big reasons that they are in the 2015 CRM Watchlist winner's circle, is
that they are, after years of tumult, starting to get a real handle on the market and where

its going and are focusing the company's work at least around their customer-facing
technology, in alignment with that market. All these predictions by the research and
advisory firms do show that SAP CRM is not going away anytime soon, its still there
evolving. SAP is rebuilding its CRM software to counter its competitors head on.
A warning for people involved with CRM is that the moving away of SAP CRM from an
on-premise platform to a cloud-based platform will indeed need re-skilling. What
consultants should do to stay relevant? Consultants familiar with SAP know that
everyone who works in SAP is either a functional consultant, who understands & maps
business requirements in CRM, or a technical or techno-functional consultant
responsible for designing user interface, integration, enhancing the solution etc. In my
view, the role of a functional consultant will not go away. They will keep on doing what
they were doing except that they will have to play a dual role in cloud-based projects.
The dual role of an architect or a manager along with the usual customizing of the
software. Technical consultants will have to re-skill themselves in Fiori, Cloud
application studio, Hybris in addition to their ABAP skills. The usual timeline of CRM
projects that the consultants have to think of now. Gone are the days when a CRM
project used to go on for more than several months. The need of the hour is to
implement a cloud-based solution in quick time in weeks.
What will happen to the modules available in on-premise SAP CRM? How people skilled
in those modules will get affected?
Lets analyze three basic pillars of CRM Sales, Marketing & Service first.
For Sales - People, who still think their on-premise sales CRM skills are good enough,
will have to reconsider. I dont think customers are more interested in using CRM onpremise anymore for sales functionality excluding quote and ordering. Customers will
prefer using cloud for customer or rather cloud for sales for their core SFA accounts &
contacts, activities, leads and opportunities. Solutions such as deal finder, lead scoring,
infinite insight, 360 degree view, social selling are the added CRM capabilities that CRM
sales consultants should get re skilled along with cloud for sales. For quote and ordering
on premise will still be used for some time.
For Marketing - I dont think consultants who are banking on their SAP CRM on-premise
marketing skills will be relevant anymore. Certainly, they will have to re-skill themselves
with Hybris Marketing and / or cloud for marketing. We are certainly seeing customers

moving away from on-premise to cloud. We are also seeing many of the customers
adopting marketing automation tools such as Marketo, Eloqua and Adobe. All these
marketing automation tools need to be coupled with a CRM for an end to end cycle. So
the other areas that marketing consultants should focus on is this integration between
automation tools and CRM. Funds management is another area, in which SAP has a
very strong presence. I believe that it will still be favoured by customers. For TPM
consultants, I think customers will continue using on-premise for next few years before
TPM is available on cloud full-fledged.
For Service - Field Service is arguably SAPs best product and best-kept secret. Onpremise CRM provides depth and breadth of the solution in customer service. I dont
think any of the vendors can compete with SAP in this area. At this moment, all the
functionalities are available on-premise and slowly SAP is moving functionalities to
cloud. We are still seeing many customers buying on-premise CRM, to use customer
service functionality including SAPs call center application. So consultants skilled in this
area will be in demand. But I must say that they will have to re-skill on cloud for service
in the due course. Till the time SAP moves every functionality of customer service to
cloud , on-premise CRM service skills will be relevant.
Now its your turn - to re skill yourselves on cloud, Hybris,
Marketing automation, Fiori, social selling, Customer Engagement
Intelligence etc. to stay relevant