The future of CRM: SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C)

The demand for CRM solutions is large. The worldwide market for 2015 estimate the Gartner analysts to 26.3 billion dollars – by far the largest segment of the software market. Many companies have some catching up and increasingly asking service providers and manufacturers. With the trend away from on-premise licenses to cloud services should especially Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics benefit – one might think: SAP has however used the grace of late birth and sail the competition with SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C).

In autumn 2015, SAP announced a revolutionary solution with C4C which goes far beyond the classic CRM addition, thanks to digital networking through social media analysis, customer service and support. Industry experts and IT managers were skeptical that promises were dismissed as pure marketing measures. But SAP is keeping its word and continuously published four times a year a version with extended functionality, the standardized supports new processes.

Meanwhile SAP C4C mastered the high customer demands and has grown into one of the most advanced cloud-based CRM systems on the market. As the cloud dominates about half of the CRM market and software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in 2015 recorded an increase of 27 percent, the solution captures the spirit of the time. Since it is hardly surprising that SAP ERP can be SAP 6.0 with sophisticated on-premise processes run for CRM and the successor S / 4hana it has hardly innovative and efficient functionality.

Instead, SAP focused on the cloud and should convince even the last skeptics so. For the CRM in the cloud is to SAP C4C safely. SAP operates the application as a public or private cloud in their own data center and transmits the data encrypted. Concerns about IT security and the loss of business-critical data thus belong to the past.

The competitors in the CRM market have long jumped on the train: Salesforce CRM is built exclusively on the cloud and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are the first two releases of new versions only in the cloud. Since it does not matter that the on-premise deployment of the software is optional. In short: On the cloud passes no way in CRM.