Community Short Facts - December 2022

IDC MarketScape Report

The global IDC MarketScape Report 2022 lists Zuora as a leading provider of enterprise subscription and usage management solutions. The analysts recommend Zuora whenever companies need "a comprehensive [...] subscription and usage-based revenue management solution to intelligently automate the quote-to-revenue process." Among other things, the MarketScape report highlights Zuora's strengths, which include platform maturity, flexibility in choosing business models, and highly differentiated pricing capabilities. Customers surveyed by IDC also said they were "very confident" that Zuora will continue to be their vendor of choice for subscription and usage management.

According to IDC, Zuora's broad feature set gives customers the ability to implement recurring revenue business models not only on a selective, case-by-case basis, but also very flexibly across the enterprise. The report also highlights that customers value the ability to leverage comprehensive collections and churn management capabilities, which are also supported by analytics to ensure that revenue stays on track. The IDC MarketScape report analyzes the subscription management services vendor market and identified twelve key vendors within this sector that were evaluated. The evaluation is based on interviews with vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences to provide a consistent assessment of each company.

Field Service Cloud

MobileX has won the Hübner Group as a new customer for Service Platform, MobileX's public cloud solution for digital deployment planning and order processing in technical service. Hübner has been supplying innovative products and services for the transport sector for decades. The company is a global leader in transition systems for rail vehicles and buses, and is also a provider of chassis technology and cockpit display solutions and door seal and safety profiles. With the introduction of the Field Service Cloud, Hübner aims to standardize and digitalize service processes for the Mobility Rail and Mobility Road business units and pave the way for a global system that supports the expansion of the service business.

In order to digitize and standardize the service process, Hübner 2021 looked around for a field service management solution. After an initial test phase with MobileX in March 2022, the company opted for this offering in July 2022. The decisive factors here were the flexibility in terms of requirements and the opportunity to help shape the development of the MobileX ServicePlatform. The introduction of the Field Service Cloud is to be part of a global, digital after-sales and service system - from the customer portal to the integration of service partners.

IT automation with AI

Red Hat and IBM Research have announced Project Wisdom, a community project to create intelligent natural language processing (NLP) capabilities for Ansible and the IT automation industry. The project uses an AI model and aims to increase developer productivity in IT automation and make IT automation more accessible and understandable to IT professionals with different skills and backgrounds. According to a 2021 IDC forecast, "By 2026, about 85 percent of organizations will combine human expertise with AI, ML, NLP and pattern recognition to improve predictions across the enterprise and make employees 25 percent more productive and effective.

Technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, pattern recognition and knowledge graphs are producing increasingly accurate and contextual insights, predictions and recommendations." Project Wisdom is based on AI foundation models derived from IBM's AI for Code and allows users to enter commands in the form of a simple English sentence. It then parses the sentence and creates the desired automation workflow, which is deployed as an Ansible playbook and can be used to automate any number of IT tasks. Unlike other AI-driven coding tools, Project Wisdom does not focus on application development, but addresses the increasing complexity of enterprise IT that comes with the growing adoption of hybrid clouds.

Service Cloud of SAP

Whether a service organization can make a sustainable contribution to business success depends to a large extent on whether it is able to provide customers with the right information at the right time. If it is, not only the individual customer lifecycle, but the brand and thus the entire company is enhanced. What it takes to empower service teams to be growth drivers is promised by the new SAP Intelligent Service Cloud. If SAP has its way, service agents can stop dreaming: the recently launched Intelligent Service Cloud consistently focuses on smart features and more efficient working. The SAP Intelligent Service Cloud has a lot of potential and will continue to develop rapidly. At the moment, it does not have the same range of functions as its predecessor. However, the complete alignment of customer service functionalities is expected by the end of 2023.

Nevertheless: For certain requirements, the previous solution will still be the right version. Keyword: integrated functions of sales and service. So the revolution remains off for now. Especially since the standard service cloud will continue to be improved and maintained and there are currently no plans for its expiry. But: companies that think strategically and want to shape their service organization into a true brand ambassador, i.e., dynamically improve the customer journey, should take a look at SAP's Intelligent Service Cloud. SAP is betting big on the new solution. And the new functions are without a doubt capable of significantly improving processes in customer service.

SuccessFactors Excellence Award

NTT Data Solutions announced that it has received an SAP Global SuccessFactors Award for Partner Excellence 2022 for its customer success management efforts. The awards were given to leading partners who made contributions related to SuccessFactors solutions. "Cloud-based SuccessFactors solutions are among the most important success factors for digital transformation," said Norbert Rotter, CEO of NTT Data Solutions. "We are honored to be among the winners of SAP's inaugural SuccessFactors Partner Excellence Award. This once again underscores how successfully SAP and NTT work together as global strategic partners."

SuccessFactors solutions help companies simplify and accelerate processes. Intelligent self-service functions guarantee the transparency of HR data, reduce the workload for the HR department and actively involve employees in HR-related processes. Routine tasks, such as recording working hours and activities performed, run automatically. The software suite also offers digital processes for professional development, performance evaluations and target agreements.

xSuite portal in the SAP Store

The xSuite Group makes its business partner portal Sphere available for an end-to-end, cloud- and SAP-based P2P process via the SAP Store. The application readiness check required for this was successfully carried out and completed. The portal is a SaaS and cloud solution that runs on the SAP Business Technology Platform and is suitable for all S/4 models. In the P2P process, xSuite Sphere automates data and document exchange as well as communication with suppliers. These thus run via the cloud. Example PO Flip (automated conversion of an order into an invoice): Through the portal, the customer submits a purchase order to the vendor, who creates an invoice in it with the click of a mouse. Functions such as self-service vendor onboarding or dynamic discounting (for liquidity management) are also available in the portal. The Business Partner Portal is the first xSuite solution to be offered via the SAP Store.

Continuous Testing

Tricentis, a testing platform for cloud and enterprise applications, announces the launch of NeoLoad 9.0 and new Test Management for Jira and Salesforce products. The solutions expand the portfolio in the areas of continuous performance testing, test management and test automation. With the new additions, Tricentis is investing in application quality and shortening delivery times to improve business-critical results. ERP applications are at the heart of modern businesses, and downtime or performance bottlenecks that end users perceive can prove costly. The new version of NeoLoad now includes RealBrowser, a feature that combines browser-based testing with existing protocol coverage in a single solution.