On Monday, as Oracle Corp. announced it will bundle its CRM, marketing and other software products into a suite that focuses on customer experience, news continued to spread like volcanic lava that the company’s CEO was about to buy an island.

Big nui (Hawaiian for news) indeed.  Larry Ellison had an eye on purchasing most of Lanai, an island near Maui. Word of the real estate deal broke June 20, and by Thursday, Ellison had closed the deal.

Ellison bought 88,000 acres of Lanai, about 98% of its 141 square miles. According to the Maui News, the former owner – Castle & Cooke Inc. — had asked for as much as $600 million for this American slice of paradise.

The deal landed Ellison control of the island’s tourism, as well as ownership of two golf courses, two resorts, commercial and residential buildings and lots of open space.

Meanwhile, on Monday night – with tech reporters already briefed days in advance on Oracle’s product announcement – company co-President Mark Hurd held court on a Gotham Hall stage in New York to unveil Oracle Customer Experience (CX).

The suite enables businesses to respond to a market centered on the customer experience, Anthony Lye, the company’s senior vice president of CRM, told SearchCRM in an interview. It includes familiar Oracle products — such as the Fusion CRM platform — and offerings the company recently captured through acquisitions, including FatWire, RightNow and Vitrue.

Although it couldn’t complete with visions of sun and surf, the product announcement wasn’t completely buried in the news cycle.

Tech publications covered the new strategy. And the unveiling spawned a fair share of tweets – including, “You say you want a (customer experience) revolution?” and “Is the whole greater than the parts yet?” –.

But a Google search during Monday always first offered scores of results about Ellison’s purchase. And most of Twitter was abuzz about Ellison’s new digs

Among those tweets, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a Web content sharing company, wrote: “The shocking news today should be that Larry Ellison didn’t previously own an island.”

And former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich offered: “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is buying Hawaii’s 6th-largest island. Other billionaires are buying the rest of America in the 2012 election.”

If you are currently running Oracle Siebel 7.8 X, you will be required to start paying for Extended Support beginning Wednesday, June 1.

In May 2010, Oracle moved the 7.8X customer base from Premier Support to Extended Support and told customers it would waive the support fees for one year. So, time’s up.

Oracle officials had no comment as to why the company waived the fee in the first place, or why it will now start charging these customers.

“Oracle would like people to upgrade and they say that 62% of their customers are on 8.0 or above,” said William Band, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. “This time a year ago they may have had some resistance [from remaining 7.8x customers] and so they waived the service fee so as to not rock the boat, and now they are putting it back in. “

In announcing this change, Oracle gave a rundown on support options now available for the Siebel base. Also, it provides details on its support offerings in its Oracle Lifetime Support Policy for Oracle applications, an online document dated April 2011. Here are the choices:

Premier Support. In order to get this top-level support, customers are required to be on Siebel 8.0 X or higher. The premier support product offers a standard five-year support policy. This “award-winning, next generation support program’’ is no longer offered to 7.8X users.

Extended Support. With this plan, customers of 7.8X will receive support from the Oracle Global Customer Support group and have access to 7.8X fixes. Extended Support is offered as a three-year program.

Sustaining Support. For customers opting for this service level, they can stay on 7.8X and receive support from the Oracle Customer Support group. This plan provides access to existing 7.8X fixes, but not those created after May 2010. Sustaining support plans are available to either Premier or Extended Support customers for when their current plans expire.

If you are a Siebel user, let us know how you are navigating through the support changes. We would like to hear about your plans. Contact Rose Cafasso at rcafasso@techtarget.com

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/voices-of-crm/oracle-siebel-customers-what%e2%80%99s-your-next-move/feed/ 0 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/voices-of-crm/are-collaboration-tools-the-new-crm-user-interface/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/voices-of-crm/are-collaboration-tools-the-new-crm-user-interface/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:51:15 +0000 Barney Beal http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/voices-of-crm/?p=463 What will CRM users require from their application interfaces in the future and how quickly will vendors be able to adapt?

It’s an interesting question amidst the rise of social networks and mobile capabilities.

Some folks from Salesforce.com were in town recently talking up the latest updates to their next release Spring ’11, the 46^th release of Salesforce.com which is now being tested by administrators.

There’s a decent overview of Spring ’11 with screenshots and video on their site.

Amidst the promotions of the latest features and new functionality, one thing struck me. Salesforce.com is putting a lot of effort into Chatter, its collaboration tool. It’s one way of extending Salesforce.com beyond the traditional CRM user and into the wider enterprise. They cited some customer success, notably Dell, which has 80,000 employees using Chatter and claims a 10% productivity gain.

But what struck me is this:

“We expect people to live in the feed,” said Scott Holden, product marketing manager for the Sales Cloud.

Meaning, Salesforce.com expects users to do their work not in the familiar tabbed interface but in the Twitter-like, Facebook-like Chatter UI. Salesforce.com isn’t the only vendor moving in this direction either. SAP is building out a collaboration tool with StreamWork, which it’s adding to its Business Suite. Oracle was one of the first to market with its Social CRM tools, essentially collaboration tools for sales people. And of course, while a slightly different animal, Sharepoint is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing server products in its history, underscoring the new emphasis on enterprise collaboration.

Given some of the recent news around social  media (a Nielsen study suggesting people spend more time on social media sites than on email, Facebook tops Google as the most-visited website) maybe it’s not a bad idea.

Then again, those numbers are based on consumers and the enterprise is different. My colleague Jessica Scarpati put together a nice story recently questioning whether Facebook for the enterprise is really the key to enterprise social software. How much of this is really driven by the vendors? Are sales people really clamouring to be able to enter forecast information in something like Twitter?

Besides, even as it talks about making Chatter feeds where people “live” — Salesforce.com is releasing new Outlook integration features.

Also interesting to me is the fact that much of Salesforce.com’s early success was thanks to its user interface which appealed to end user sales reps as much as their managers and got them to use the application. Are they already ready to move on?

Maybe they should be. Certainly mobile devices have done their own part to transform the CRM UI. The wave of tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show and the promise of video both promise change, as Denis Pombriant wrote recently.

Change is coming rapidly. How much CRM users want, or are ready for, remains a question.

As a jury is preparing today to decide whether SAP owes Oracle $1.7 billion for copyright infringement, word emerged that HP is on the verge of signing a megadeal with Salesforce.com. HP will replace 35,000 to 40,000 seats of Oracle Siebel with Salesforce.com, Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research wrote in a note to clients, citing industry contacts. Salesforce.com is hoping to close the deal before its Dreamforce user conference the first week of December, and if it does, someone from HP will deliver a keynote address at the event.

Before we examine the shift in the tech world that this would represent, let’s consider the massive egos that are operating in this incestuous world.

• Mark Hurd resigns as CEO of HP over expense account irregularities and violations of HP’s standards of business conduct, even though it recognized he didn’t violate its sexual harassment policy.
• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fires off a letter ripping the HP board for firing Hurd (his tennis buddy). Then hires him at Oracle. Oracle has an open slot for president, thanks to the departure of former president Charles Phillips who later takes the CEO gig at Infor.
• HP, in search of a new CEO, hires former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker. Predictably, Ellison rips HP again, this time for hiring someone who held the top job at SAP for less than a year.
• Lawsuits go back and forth over Hurd’s hiring and eventually Oracle, HP, Mark Hurd come to quick settlement.
• Meanwhile, Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP, which claims that SAP’s onetime subsidiary, TomorrowNow, stole its intellectual property, goes to trial. During the proceedings, Oracle attempts to subpoena Apotheker to force him to appear in court in San Francisco, but he can’t be found. The search turns into a game of “Where in the World is Leo Apotheker.”

If Chowdhry is right and this deal comes together then Apotheker may show up in San Francisco after all — on stage with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

One can’t help but wonder just what a giddy Benioff would come up with as he stands on stage with one of his former boss’s biggest applications customers, now his own. Benioff already had a few jokes at OpenWorld in the wake of Ellison calling out Salesforce.com’s security model, scalability and more.

But aside from the high drama what does it all mean for the market?

It would obviously be a big win for Salesforce.com but the company doesn’t really need HP to validate that large enterprises will run its SaaS-based application. It’s got plenty of similar customers that it’s more than happy to talk about. It would be a major loss for Siebel, which is also losing a big customer in Microsoft as Microsoft deploys its own CRM system in house.

It would seem that CRM deployments increasingly are SaaS-based over on-premise. Even Oracle, by most accounts, is selling far more of its CRM On Demand product than Siebel.

So, how much of this possible move simply a matter of Apotheker being vindictive? How much is it indicative that people will not wait for the ultimate arrival of Fusion Applications and turning to alternatives?

Benioff’s opening line?

“I come in peace.”

Except he didn’t. Not really. Benioff had plenty of material thanks to the release of Exalogic, Oracle’s latest approach to the cloud, which apparently means purchasing a $1 million Web server.

Sunday night, during the OpenWorld opening keynote, Ellison took some shots at Salesforce.com, saying, “It’s really a very weak security model. If that database goes down, all those customers go down. There is no virtualization. It’s not fault tolerant. It’s not secure. It’s not elastic.”

Exalogic, released by Ellison Sunday night, is a complement to the Exadata database machine. It’s 30 servers bundled together with software for maximum performance.

But, Benioff countered, “the cloud does not come in a box.” In fact he had a number of zingers he shared with a packed house, there partly to hear his response, partly to hear Salesforce.com’s latest announcement, but likely mostly there for the free iPod Nano giveaway.
Among Benioff’s responses:

• “We are the cloud people and because we’re the cloud people, we’re a peaceful people.”
• “I’m not going to show you new computers that are taller than I am. I am not going to show you a cloud in a box because clouds are not in a box. They never were in a box.”
• “You don’t have to have hardware and software engineered together because it is together. I’m not sure I understand that, but it is very exciting.”
• “I guess Amazon sides with Salesforce.” [In response to Ellison's Sunday night assertion that Oracle's definition of the cloud is more in line with Amazon's definition and Amazon CTO Werner Vogel's subsequent tweet.]
• “Larry I appreciate you advertising my book. Larry it’s not called Way Behind the Cloud it’s Behind the Cloud. Cute very cute, I appreciate that book sales went up Sunday.”
• To guest Michael Dell, who followed up his morning keynote at OpenWorld with an appearance at the Salesforce.com event: “You talk about barriers. Have you thought about these big boxes with exes on them and say ‘do not come here’?” [A reference to Exalogic.]

It’s not the first time Salesforce.com and Benioff were welcomed to OpenWorld with a jibe. Last year, in the run up to the show Ellison called Salesforce.com an “itty bitty” little application which Benioff responded to with a pitch for Service Cloud 2.

Similarly, the real reason Benioff made his appearance this year (and spent what was no doubt a significant amount of money) was not to trade barbs with Ellison but to promote Chatter 2, the next release of Salesforce.com’s collaboration platform. Chatter was released just two and a half months ago, but Chatter 2′s new features include: filters to allow employees to sort through separate conversations and groups; Chatter topics, similar to the Twitter hashtag; Chatter recommendations; a Chatter desktop client; and new dashboards and analytics capabilities.

Dell took the opportunity to promote a new product as well. He used the opportunity to provide a look at the Dell Streak and a sneak preview of a new seven-inch tablet PC.

Benioff ended his address by bringing out a flag with clouds and the word surrender on it. But it’s obvious Salesforce.com has no such plans.

One oddity from the presentation — it comes with a pre-built integration for Salesforce.com data.

Is SAP not even bothering to pretend it has its own on-demand CRM product anymore?

SAP has taken a great deal of criticism from both analysts and the tech press over Business ByDesign — its on-demand ERP suite. And most of it was well deserved. Yet, that criticism of SAP for its lack of vision or commitment to Software as a Service rarely mentioned that SAP had actually built an on-demand application years before it even mentioned Business ByDesign. That’s likely because most people didn’t know about it in the first place, or at least had forgotten about it.

Aside from an announcement at the initial roll out and an update or two, SAP hasn’t exactly been pushing it CRM OnDemand product on the marketplace.

And, judging from yesterday’s SaaS BI announcement, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. Genband Inc., a maker of networking gear, was the one customer highlighted in the briefing and it runs Oracle on the back end and Salesforce.com for CRM, along with Crystal Reports.

When SAP first launched CRM OnDemand, the assumption was that it did so to keep Salesforce.com from siphoning off its install base. Some customers were happy to leave SAP CRM license on the shelf and launch Salesforce.com rather than go through the pain of a SAP CRM implementation. Looking at Genband, it doesn’t look like that worked.

Maybe that’s because SAP launched CRM OnDemand in an isolated tenancy model versus multi-tenancy and couldn’t make it profitable — the same problem that plagued the first version of Business ByDesign. Maybe it wasn’t all that committed to SaaS CRM in the first place and the initial project sponsors have moved on from the company. There’s certainly been plenty of executive turnover at the company.

Whatever the reason, SAP CRM OnDemand has not lived up to its promise.

In contrast, Oracle seems quite committed to SaaS CRM, despite Larry Ellison’s well-publicized rants on cloud computing. According to Ray Wang, an analyst with the Altimeter Group, Oracle CRM OnDemand now accounts for 85% of its CRM sales.

More recently SAP has made a renewed commitment to SaaS. As part of its pledge, it did say it was re-architecting CRM OnDemand in the multi-tenant model. But we sure didn’t hear about that yesterday. It’s redesigned Business ByDesign and is preparing to roll it out again to the market. It’s hired John Wookey, Oracle’s former development chief, to revamp its on-demand arsenal and it now offers CRM, carbon management and e-sourcing applications on-demand.

But given its track record with CRM and Business ByDesign one has to wonder how it will all work out. Maybe BI will be different.

This year is not as easy as some. Gone are the heady days of CRM news, like in 2005 when all this took was throwing acquisitions, such as the Aspect-Concerto and Oracle-Siebel deals on a list, on a list with innovations, like CDI and Microsoft CRM 3.0. Even the top CRM stories of 2008 were easier to define.

But while the year was light on major acquisitions and suddenly-hot technologies, it was not without its shake-ups and developments. With the dust slowly settling on the market leaders and the major suite vendors firmly in place, 2009 became a time for everyone, including users, to regroup and map out where they’re headed. We start with the vendors:

Microsoft grows up

The year saw Microsoft CRM add its one millionth user and take Microsoft Online international. With the recession looming over 2009, Microsoft also took the opportunity to target Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand users with a special price promotion. It wasn’t alone either. Obviously sensing that price was a competitive differentiator, Microsoft and SugarCRM both took steps to make CRM cheaper, simpler and cloudier.

SAP heads for the clouds

Meanwhile, SAP’s roadmap took a familiar turn. The applications heavyweight announced plans to not only roll out its full SaaS-based business suite Business ByDesign to full production, but to add multiple business applications on-demand including sales automation, travel and expense and services management. However, for all its commitment to on-demand, SAP had very little to say about its existing on-demand CRM product. Neither did anyone else.

It may not matter. Some customers are obviously happy with SAP’s existing CRM applications. Coca-Cola is using SAP CRM to roll out the ordering system for its new beverage dispenser.

 Oracle straightens out its CRM roadmap

Oracle, tied up for years bringing together the spoils of its acquisition spree under the Fusion Applications umbrella, made some headway in 2009, announcing that the first set of Fusion Applications will be released this year, including sales and marketing modules. Oracle’s CRM roadmap includes a heavy dose of social CRM as well as long-awaited features such as running Siebel in Outlook. Paul Greenberg shared his take on the CRM roadmap and Siemens seemed to be happy with Oracle’s CRM direction. Siemens dumped a number of SAP projects in hopes of standardizing its CRM systems on Oracle.

Salesforce makes a platform push

Salesforce.com continued its rapid rollout of CRM features, teaming up with Cisco for a contact center in the cloud and pushing its Service Cloud, which features Twitter integration. CEO Marc Benioff spared no expense on marketing it, buying up a huge booth and staging a presentation at Oracle’s own conference.

But it wasn’t all just about the vendors.

“Cloud” gets a little cloudier

Confused about the difference between hosted, on-demand, SaaS and cloud applications? Direct your frustration to the man cited above (who is now calling Salesforce.com a “cloud company”). But it’s not just Benioff. Sage and Consona announced plans this year that will add a little more to the cloud CRM confusion. With the emergence of offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and others, it’s now possible to own the software but rent the infrastructure. It’s only getting more complicated.

Users test out their social CRM strategies

Clearly, the term of the year goes to “Social CRM,” thanks largely to the vendor and analyst community (more below) that have helped push the term beyond the early, simpler days when it was called CRM and Web 2.0 or social networks. For all the hype and confusion, 2009 marked a year when businesses started listening and formulating a strategy around social CRM. For example, Xerox embarked on a social media monitoring program and JellyVision Labs has begun leveraging social networks to help it sales force. SearchCRM.com also managed to add a couple columnists to help readers sort through the noise. Allen Bonde has been writing about social CRM from the marketing perspective while Paul Greenberg is tackling real world examples of social CRM and the strategy behind them.

CRM software sellers get social medicine

If 2009 was a year in which businesses began experimenting with social CRM, it was also the year the vendors in the market jumped in with both feet. RightNow bought HiveLive to round out its social offering, NetSuite partnered with InsideView to get social with its CRM and ERP suite. Salesforce.com, not only added integration to social networks via the Service Cloud, it promised to deliver a collaboration platform with Chatter. Again, SearchCRM.com turned to Paul Greenberg who compared several of the emerging social CRM products.

And the No. 1 CRM story of 2009?

Remember “doing more with less,” that trite little term that meant management still wanted you to work as hard, get as much accomplished, and bring in as much revenue, only with less resources? Well that had CRM practitioners focused on…

Saving money

There was no shortage of advice on how to save. Gartner offered both five low cost contact center infrastructure projects and five low-cost CRM strategies. Forrester suggested ways to mine more value from existing CRM implementations while others started to see CRM outsourcing as more attractive. Marketing got in on the action as well. Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal suggested the recession could reshape MRM and marketing while Gartner suggested now might be a good time to buy MRM.

Others may argue there were bigger stories or more important developments (and we welcome that feedback), but from our perspective that was the best of 2009. Here’s hoping 2010 is a little easier and a lot more profitable.

I plan to be there tomorrow at Benioff’s session to see if he plays the polite guest (my guess is he will), but in the meantime, there were a few interesting tidbits from some successful CRM deployments at a customer panel.

These are not necessarily Oracle-specific but some practices I hadn’t seen before and worth noting here.

ANZ, an Australian financial services firm, extended and upgraded a small Siebel 7.8 deployment to Siebel 8.0 across the organization. A new CEO wanted to make the company more customer-centric and pushed for the new system. Getting executive buy in is a well-known imperative for a successful CRM project. So is ensuring user adoption, which ANZ did by involving users throughout the project.

“The native Siebel 7.8 UI is really devoted to call center users and not everyone’s cup of tea,” Christian Ventner, head of sales and services for the bank, noted.

But, beyond that as part of the project, ANZ included an “I know the customer” program. To provide a greater customer experience, ANZ included a large “What the customer wants” button as part of the UI. So, right away an employee notes why the customer is there, be it for investment advice or a question about an account. It can be adjusted by role (for example, a teller may not be able to offer investment advice) and quite clearly ensures the customer is getting the right person and the right information.

US Foodservice tests the application in a live environment

US Foodservice went beyond just including users in its design; it had them test out multiple products in a live environment. The company was transitioning from a niche CRM application that hadn’t met its needs to Oracle CRM On Demand. It narrowed down its list of finalists to three and then took the applications to its sales reps.

“We decided to go to the divisions with [reps] and let them work with it,” said Bridget Warns, senior director of US Foodservice. “In real time, we were configuring this application based on their feedback. The investment they had was key in our success of rolling it out.”

Three clicks or less for Scottish Widows

Similarly, Scottish Widows, a UK-based life pension and investment company, was choosing between Oracle On Demand and Salesforce.com and tried both in a live environment for two months with its sales force, swapping out one for the other.

“From that we were really able to build our business case and get backing from our director that it was the right thing to do,” Stephen Miller sales operations manager for Scottish Widows, said. “We rolled it out to 300 people at 14 sites in two months.”

Additionally, it made sure to make the application easily navigable.

“We wanted to ensure we met key design principles,” Miller said. “In any application there was a max of three clicks to get to any information.”

Nothing grabs attention in this market like tales of CRM failure, but these are a few tactics that led to success.

So what?

My general experience in covering the CRM market over the last several years the “leading” vendor in the market matters far more to financial analysts and the vendors themselves and than anyone buying or using the software. What matters to CRM buyers and users is that their vendor is viable, innovating the product and generally responsive to its customers.

However, what is interesting about the Gartner research is how top-heavy the market is. According to Gartner’s Sharon Mertz, in 2008 SAP claimed the greatest percent of the CRM market with a 22.5% share, though that’s down from a 25.5% in 2007, a drop of 0.8%. It was followed by Oracle with a 16.1% share, Salesforce.com with a 10.6% share and Amdocs with a 4.9% share.

Who’s in sixth place? That would be “others” with a 39.6% share of the CRM market.

So, given Gartner’s estimate of $19.5 billion in revenue for the CRM market in 2008, a 12.5% increase from 2007′s $8.13 billion market figure, the top five vendors certainly appear viable.

But, are they innovating their CRM products?

There was a lively conversation in February on innovation and enterprise application vendors, and SAP and Oracle specifically, which I won’t get into here, rather I’ll simply point you to Josh Greenbaum, Dennis Howlett who scores it Oracle 1-0, Vinnie Mirchandani, who got the application innovation discussion started, Paul Greenberg, who takes a look at Oracle’s CRM innovation specifically, and Larry Dignan.

Let me simply add that, while SearchCRM doesn’t devote a lot of space to product releases these days, the pace with which the major vendors are issuing releases has slowed considerably. Since the release of Siebel 8.0 and 8.1, Oracle has been relatively quiet with the exception of some interesting Social CRM applications. With SAP 2007, the “market leader” revamped its user interface and convinced some of its customers to take their CRM software off the shelf.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com continues to issue its three releases per year including integrations with social networking sites, an area Microsoft and others have latched onto networks like Twitter as well. Microsoft, by the way, had the strongest growth rate in 2008, increasing CRM revenue 75%, according to Gartner.

Salesforce .com and Microsoft are innovating, but their recent endeavors seem to focus more on building out platforms based on their CRM software, that partners and customers can expand upon with their own applications.

So, that leaves the question of whether the major CRM vendors are responsive to their customers. I think that the recent rash of developments around social networks and CRM demonstrate that the vendors do see a lot of confusion and a cry for help on the part of their customers about how to deal with the latest disruptive innovation. Yet, reviews of support issues with the big vendors are typically pretty mixed.

In its press release on its CRM research, Gartner advises CRM vendors to align their “products, services and contractual agreements to enable customer business imperatives of higher client acquisition, retention and satisfaction.” Maybe they should do the same for themselves?

If the major vendors aren’t innovating — are the “others,” who make up nearly 40% of the CRM market?

While its methodology and definitions differ from Gartner’s a bit, Forrester Research has set about identifying the extended CRM ecosystem with a new report. According to Bill Band, the report’s author, applications like community platforms, customer forums and enterprise feedback management have entered the CRM stage.

Paul Greenberg has a thoughtful overview of Band’s CRM ecosystem research over at his PGreenblog.

He writes:

Bill wrote an important piece here, people. It’s a first look at an extended CRM ecosystem – one that goes beyond – well beyond – the traditional pillars of CRM – sales, marketing and customer service to a number of other areas. Not only that, it refines the traditional pillars to some extent too – thus building exactly what Bill says here – a CRM ecosystem that is considerably more encompassing than the traditional version of CRM.

Here, it seems, is where the innovation is happening, in areas like social CRM, social media monitoring and customer loyalty. These are the sorts of technology CRM professionals need to start taking a closer look at.

For a company that proclaims itself the leader in CRM, it sure didn’t have much to say about the subject at its recent Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP released its Business Suite 7, which includes a new CRM update, in February. But you wouldn’t have known it listening to the keynotes this week. While last year’s conference featured some significant news with SAP’s partnership with RIM to run SAP CRM natively on the BlackBerry, this year featured nary a word about CRM.

Certainly SAP wanted to focus on its new sustainability efforts, both its own and its product for customers, as well as the BusinessObjects Explorer, search technology based on BusinessObjects Polestar acquisition.

And I did sit down with Jujhar Singh, senior vice president of CRM product management and Volker Hildenbrand, vice president of solution management for CRM. They talked about SAP’s efforts to make CRM “simple, powerful and easy to use and deploy,” which is pretty much the same message around the business suite as a whole. SAP’s focus on business processes was also made clear and Singh and Hildenbrand both mentioned that SAP has incorporated CRM with end-to-end business processes around case management for the public sector and loyalty management.

“CRM is not just for the front end you have to tap into the back end,” Singh said.

Yet, that was about the extent of it. Even Paul Greenberg, industry luminary, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and never one to spare a word when it comes to the CRM market had little to say about SAP’s CRM efforts in his blog:

With some caveats, especially related to Territory Management, they’ve developed a CRM product, CRM 7.0 that will be highly regarded and is a valuable addition to the choices that that enterprises have.

Greenberg’s commentary focused more on SAP’s excessive adherence to a scripted message, some criticism of one exec in particular and his take on SAP’s on-demand aspirations:

I am constantly perplexed by the on demand strategy of this company. Leo was both vague and ultimately defensive and didn’t provide any real reason to let me see that SAP is on the right path to an actual Business ByDesign product that is anything but fluff. I heard Leo make a commitment to “on demand” or “on demand, on premise, hybrid or anything that you want to use.” I even heard him speak on the “cloud coming to earth” and their architectural map had a bottom layer of private cloud – virtualization – and public cloud in that order. But the delivery dates? Unclear. Again. It was almost as if he said, “We are committed to on demand and we’ll deliver it to you….someday.”

Business ByDesign (or the absence thereof) got plenty of coverage before and during the show. Maybe unnecessarily. As my colleague Courtney Bjorlin pointed out, several attendees had no interest in SAP’s cloud ambitions and a few weren’t even sure what it was.

A story from Reuters that “SAP’s cloud venture fades,” drew some attention as well as a chronology of SAP’s Business ByDesign efforts to date. Joshua Greenbuam did an excellent job of shredding most of the points made by Reuters, so I won’t pile on here, but I would add that there’s no mention of SAP’s CRM On Demand products whatsoever in those stories. Sort of like Sapphire — or the past year for that matter – no mention of CRM On Demand.

SAP CEO Leo Apotheker was right in his keynote when he said, “if you think SAP is a newcomer to on demand, then think again. We’ve been doing it for five years. You can do your research.”

Of course, SAP itself is not without fault if people don’t understand that. Its PR army just hasn’t been focused there. Early analysis that CRM On Demand was just an effort by SAP to keep Salesforce.com from encroaching on its customers looking for a quick and easy way to get CRM up and running are looking more and more on target.

Apotheker did offer some promise for the future, demoing a Social Network Analyzer, but that is just a prototype at SAP Labs at this point, apparently a long way from availability.

SAP’s approach stands in stark contrast to some of its competitors. Salesforce.com issues three major releases a year, most recently its Spring 09 release, which features the ability to connect customer service data between its own customers. Even Oracle, no stranger to lengthy, on-premise development projects, has been more active with its first three Social CRM products with more on the way.

Of course, SAP still has plenty of room to grow its CRM footprint simply serving its base of ERP customers, many of whom seem content to wait. It doesn’t seem like something I’d count on.