Primacy: ERP versus CRM
The then SAP CEO Bill McDermott therefore allied himself with Microsoft as well as Adobe and had bought Qualtrics shortly before. Even Professor Hasso Plattner praised the successful C/4 announcement.
Well, obviously the whole staging was directed against Salesforce, but this plan did not work out. Under the young boss Christian Klein, SAP will have to focus on its core competence ERP and leave the CRM field to Salesforce. But it is also a fact that the pure teaching of ERP or CRM will not be enough to produce sufficient growth in the future.
As a result, both companies are now faced with the challenge of conquering further peripheral areas based on their respective core competencies. SAP is moving in the direction of logistics, SCM and analytics, and naturally HCM. Salesforce is trying in the direction of messenger services with Slack, visualization with Tableau, and wants to offer Salesforce customers a virtual and digital headquarters.
SAP and Salesforce want to grow with collaboration software. SAP still has more revenue and a better operating result, but Salesforce's stock market value is clearly greater - shareholders obviously prefer the CRM specialist to the ERP specialist.