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The cloud wars continue and this week we look into the CRM space and the battle between SAP and Salesforce.

SAP and Salesforce are both big player in the CRM space. Both offer distinctive CRM capabilities such as Omni-Channel Marketing and Support, SaaS or Cloud Access and Process Automation. They both help businesses to increase their efficiency, improve their sales processes and help increase customer experience.

SAP is a long-standing market leader in ERP and CRM

Up until 2018, when SAP introduced SAP C/4HANA, they were lagging behind their competitors and as a result, Salesforce were taking the lion’s share of this business away from long standing SAP customers.

With the acquisition Hybris, Gigya, and CallidusCloud, SAP have created a next-generation CRM software that is not just purely focused on sales but instead, and maybe more importantly is focused on improving the Customer Experience. Their new SAP C/4HANA CRM solution fully integrates with S/4HANA which makes it ideal for both small and large enterprises.

Salesforce had seen real growth in the CRM industry

In 2018 it had 19.5% of the market share. Salesforce does include features that are not often needed and these come at a cost to businesses, but they do provide a 'one stop shop.'

They do have some similar offerings

When it comes to functionality both SAP and Salesforce have very similar offerings for both small, medium and large businesses. Both offer very good Business Intelligence solutions as well as comparable Omni Channel experiences and marketing functionalities. What really separates them, especially for existing SAP customers, is their back-office integration. So let’s have look at the pros and cons for each;

Salesforce

a) Native integration with the two largest ERP systems; SAP and Oracle
b) ERP systems specially build around Salesforce; Rootstock
c) Easy to develop custom integrations with Salesforce’s Application Programming Interface (API)
d) Integrating Salesforce with your current ERP system can be costly.

SAP

a) Integration is smoother in an environment where you have an SAP back-end. Especially when this is an SAP S/4 HANA environment
b) Using C/4HANA and SAP ERP reduces licensing costs
c) Predefined Integration capabilities to SAP ERP
d) With the integration between SAP C/4HANA and SAP ERP, you will no longer use middleware
e) Compatible for integration with other ERP systems.

So, with this in mind

When will we start to see SAP making a bigger come back with its new beefed up CRM solution? Only time will tell. But it does appears both SAP and Salesforce have really upped their game and it looks like we will continue to see them both as market leaders in the CRM space for many years to come.

We would been interested to hear your thoughts on what you think makes either Salesforces or SAP better solutions. Feel free to leave a comment on our LinkedIn page.

Did you know CloudApps, Speller’s sister company, can help you recruit for your SAP CRM resource needs? Feel free to get in contact with the team at Speller for more information.