aheadCRM

Today Microsoft and Adobe announced a deep strategic partnership . Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for their Marketing, Creative, and Document Clouds; Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Wow! That is a game changer in the CRM world. It takes the other tier one players, especially Salesforce, and Oracle, following their AI announcements, plus SugarCRM, head on. While I expect some AI driven marketing functionality being announced near term the initial benefit is a leading marketing tool being accessible for Microsoft. This partnership is also a blow to Oracles IaaS story as it drives load to Azure where Oracle seems to focus on their existing customer base. Well, and then there is AWS, too … And it should be highly beneficial for both companies. Not talking about the benefits of running on a powerful cloud platform Adobe with Cortana gets access

After my SAPCRM State of the Nation and Lightat the End of the Tunnel articles of earlier this year it is time again to have a look at what and how SAP is doing in the wider CRM arena. After all SAP also recently released its 1608 Hybris version, which in my eyes makes SAP very competitive again. Let’s start with some facts, which I’d like to put into a bigger context: SAP CRM 7.0 is in mainstream maintenance until end of 2025. This should give some relief to the existing customer base SAP CRM (the on premise product) continues to receive only little investment; on the positive side this investment is very customer driven At the same time CRM 7.0 is the only version that is not in customer specific maintenance; means it is the only version that still gets legal/regulatory and other updates SAP’s CRM strategy ‘Beyond CRM’ has a strong focus on the Hybris line of products, which, I think, meanwhile is highly competitive As an aside to the above points this situation