SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) - What's in it for SAP

CRM Consultants
SAP's Cloud for Customer (C4C) is making its presence felt in the CRM market with its inbuilt integration to SAP
CRM, ECC and several other Third party applications. This also raises the following questions in the minds of
customers and CRM consultants alike.

What kind of features are Customers looking for in C4C?

What does this mean to the SAP CRM consultants and their future?

Will there be needs to customize the C4C?

What will be the needs to integrate SAP CRM with SAP C4C?

What will the CRM landscape look like?

Let us start by looking into the history of SAP and its CRM efforts in the past. SAP has been looking to get into the
CRM space since 1995 and the real push came with the acquisition of a German Salesforce Automation company
Kiefer & Viettinger with its development center in Bangalore. This became a precursor to what we know as SAP CRM
On premise solution today. SAP had to come up with an On-Demand (The old term for today's cloud) offering to
counter Salesforce.com which was picking pace in 2007-2008. This Customer On Demand (CoD) which comprised of
Sales On Demand, Service On Demand and later Social On Demand evolved into what we now know as SAP Cloud
for Customer.

SAP Cloud for customer is much more complete, robust and mature solution than its predecessors. It comes with
prepackaged integrations to SAP ERP and SAP CRM, Mobile interfaces, strong social features. The entire product
can be seen as a combination of a browser based Silverlight UI, Integrated social features of JAM, Set of rich Mobile
apps for iOS & Android, SAP HANA for Integration scenarios. SAP PI can also be a choice for Integration which we
will discuss later.

The overall architecture of SAP C4C is that of a multi-tenant architecture which means that the SAP C4C and the
Integration component itself is shared with other customers. There is also a single-tenant model for customers which
is a private edition for additional cost. The multi-tenant model means that whenever SAP upgrades or releases a
patch it might overwrite some of the custom solutions built on top of the SAP C4C solution. This is the most common
concern of customers going on a multi-tenant model. While the cloud solutions push for standardization customers
will still need their industry specific and company specific modifications in place. SAP need not look far behind than
this classic Hasso vs Marc Benioff debate as this was THE point SAP had against SFDC.

SAP Provides 2 options to Integrate SAP C4C with SAP CRM on Premise and SAP ERP.

1.

SAP PI/PO - Recommended if you already have SAP PI/PO and prefer to have Integration OnPremise

2.

SAP HANA Cloud Integration - Recommended if you are not using SAP PI and have more Cloud
to Cloud Integration
More details in this document here.
The solution options and different deployment models give rise to interesting architecture questions for SAP
Customers.

On-Premise only - We already have SAP CRM on Premise. Why do we need SAP C4C
Cloud only - Do we discard the On Premise Solution and go for SAP C4C
Private Cloud - Do we get a private edition of SAP C4C
Hybrid - Do we use SAP C4C in addition to the already existing SAP CRM On premise solution

On-Premise only - Some of the choices the CRM customers today look for are modern & easy to use UI for Sales
people, Browser based access, Mobile access - Online & Offline scenarios. SAP CRM already provides a Browser
based UI however the Mobile access is something that the customer will need to choose from a limited choice of
apps and take the burden of device choice as well as deployment. Customers who have heavily customized their
SAP CRM to suit the processes or use deep Marketing and Service functionalities and do not have a End user case
for going to cloud would prefer to keep their solution On-Premise only.
Cloud Only - SAP C4C alone would suffice if the customer is looking for a light weight solution with standard CRM
processes like Activities and opportunities. The integration choices need to be considered for which system would be
the leading system and which ERP integrations are most needed for the field force.
SAP C4C could also be an excellent candidate for replacing non SAP CRM solutions in SAP ERP customers for
better integration and more unified architecture.
Private Cloud - If customers have high needs for customization within the cloud solutions and would not want SAP
C4C upgrades and patches to be impacted then would prefer this solution. This solution is as good as having an On
Premise solution albeit on SAP C4C and not SAP CRM.
Hybrid - This solution will have both SAP CRM and SAP C4C co-existing in the CRM landscape. This is of the most
interest to SAP CRM consultants from the following point of view

What will the end architecture look like?

What processes should stay On Premise and what processes on Cloud? Would it be prudent to
customize both?

What about reporting - Will the reporting mirror the process choices? Will Cloud processes
reports available only on cloud or should they be in On Premise BI
A simplified and representative architecture diagram with all the CRM and Related components is shown below. The
most common system components of a Hybrid CRM solution are given below along with representative integrations.
From a CRM consultant point of view there are decisions to be made on Integrations, leading systems for Master
data and Transaction data, On the run Reporting and historical reporting, volume of transactions that need to be flow
between separate systems.

The C4C integration to CRM On premise could be on the basis of level of customization required, whether the
functionality is required to be on the cloud/on the field, what are the master data governance rules within the
company, Sales organization structure.
Ex: The frontline sales team will generate opportunities on the move with very minimal information (The Top 5 Customer, Product, Opportunity Phase, Value, and Volume) and the sales assistants in the back-office will enhance
the opportunities with more data that are replicated to the On-premise solution.
The C4C integration to ERP could be on the basis of types of transactions needed to be displayed to the front end
sales like Orders, Quotations or contracts. Based on the role of the Sales person whether they need pricing
information, availability checks or even customer credit information. The principle here could be that of only deploying
a "Must Have" Integration with the ERP transactions.
Reporting - The C4C Sales analytics provides standard set of reports and dashboards for the day to day use of a
Sales representative. These analytics is real time and can be integrated with the BW Data warehouse. The standard
architecture should suffice for most needs although there might be some BW reporting key figures needed on the
Sales Analytics dashboards based on the business needs.
Although we cannot go into each and every choice in this blog post one cardinal rule of CRM is that it should give a
complete historical and current view of the customer to the Salesperson/Account manager representing that
customer. All the architecture and integration decisions should be based on this principle to keep the solution useful
for the End user.

Hello Nithin,
Nice write up! Three REALLY IMPORTANT corrections:

CORRECTION #1

You wrote:
The overall architecture of SAP C4C is that of a multi-tenant architecture which means that the SAP
C4C and the Integration component itself is shared with other customers.
There isn't an "integration component" specific to SAP Cloud for Customer. The multitenant environment doesn't spontaneously force all customers to move to a new method of
integration.

The integration services in SAP Cloud for Customer are basically Enterprise Services. These
Enterprise Services are versioned and managed as part of a Services Oriented Architecture
in the exact way that enterprise services are managed with the SAP NetWeaver technology
stack for SAP's on - premise solutions. Any future deprecation of an interface is documented
in the "what's new" with each release. There will be a period of time when two versions of
the interface will be available (I can't remember the exact duration, but it is on a scale of
many months). So yes, there will be a drop dead date where the old version of the interface
will no longer be supported and all calls to that interface will fail.

BENEFIT: When SAP Cloud for Customer is integrated with any external system (SAP
and/or non-SAP systems), because two versions of the interface are available at the same
time, customers can plan, make adjustments, test the adjustments against QA systems, etc.
Each customer in a multi-tenant environment can move to the new version of the interface
at a time and pace that makes sense for them.

CORRECTION #2

You wrote:
The multi-tenant model means that whenever SAP upgrades or releases a patch it might overwrite
some of the custom solutions built on top of the SAP C4C solution.

Each upgrade or release does NOT overwrite any customers' custom solutions or
extensions on top of C4C.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Without requiring the SDK, each tenant is highly configured to match
the very specific fingerprint of each customer's organization. This configuration is called a solution profile. The
tenant profile is managed by the strong lifecycle management backbone. The tenant profile includes not only the
business configuration choices, but also all the extensibility adaptations that have been made. Extensibility
adaptations include:

Company specific documentation on a global or per-"ui page" basis

Output form customizations based on customer, market segment, or master layouts,

Custom analytics,

Custom KPI's,

UI mashups

Web service scenarios and communication arrangements,

Custom fields, and
New data object definitions
The last two bullet points are extremely interesting because this allows a customer to extend the definition of existing
data objects or create brand new data objects, without involving a developer. Custom fields can be added to screens,
control visibility of data in other fields, added to the enterprise search results, embedded on output forms (e.g., visit
reports), utilized as characteristics in the analytics engine, and dynamically enhance the web service(s) defined for
existing data objects. A great example has been published on YouTube, demonstrating the addition of a custom
field to a screen. This same concept was then further demonstrated in another video where the custom field was
made available to analytics.
The tenant can then be hyper-configured by the customers' administrators to create unique Business Roles. When
users are registered in the tenant, they are assigned one or more of the business roles. A business role defines:

Which features are available to the users assigned to the business role,

What data can the user see,

scope of data can they create or change,

The type of a page layout they see. Customers' administrators can define their own
page layouts to control the arrangement, visibility, read-only status, and mandatory state for
fields on the page. A very brief look at these page layouts is seen in the 1408 "what's
new" video segment. More information on this and all tht extensibility topics can be seen in

the SAP Cloud for Customer Administrators Guide in the section entitled Administrator
Adaptation Quick Guide (HTML5).

BENEFIT: To be clear, all of the above extensibility topics are implemented using the built-in web-based key user
tools. No developers need to be involved.
If customers or partners need to utilize the SAP Cloud Applications Studio (the SDK), the studio allows them to
work with the same entities that SAP uses in the core development of its cloud solutions and to develop solution
capabilities that have the same look and feel as the SAP standard cloud solutions.

BENEFIT: Because the SAP Cloud Applications Studio (SDK) is deeply integrated with the SAP cloud solution, it
provides a strong lifecycle management backbone that supports the long life of each customers' solution. The studio
supports the development of solution capabilities that are tailored for specific customers. The development and
deployment of these solution capabilities causes no disruption to daily business because the upload process of a
solution to a customer's production system does not require any system downtime.

CORRECTION #3

You wrote:
There is also a single-tenant model for customers which is a private edition for additional cost.
Private edition is not limited to a single tenant.
Some customers require their data to be segregated to separate physical hardware. The Private Edition is an

optional service and includes a dedicated multi-tenant system for single customer usage and customized
maintenance windows.
BENEFIT: A customer may elect to have up to 10 production tenants on a Private Edition system
(independent of the count of DEV, QA, TEST cloud tenants in their landscape) and a customized
maintenance window.
Best,
Greg Root
Senior Technology Advisor