SAP C/4 Hana is dead

E-commerce, pricing, web store, CRM, supply chain and logistics - everything was supposed to be under C/4. Bill's dream was shattered with a loud bang!

Why? A few months ago at SAP's in-house trade fair Sapphire, everything still sounded very logical: a CRM suite is the only way to manage a successful B2C strategy.

But firstly, many existing SAP customers had already realized this before SAP and built their own individual CRM suite with Hybris, SAP CRM, Adobe and many other IT tools; secondly, Adobe also had these insights five years ago and completed the project these days: with the 4 billion euro takeover of marketing automation specialist Marketo.

At the beginning of this year, Adobe swallowed up the e-commerce specialist Magento for less than two billion euros. In September, at Microsoft's in-house trade fair Ignite, SAP boss McDermott had to enter into an alliance of convenience with Microsoft and Adobe in order to save what could still be saved.

Adobe will not let the butter be taken off its bread, because it has to finance the acquisitions worth billions from this year. It is much more likely to be the other way around: Why shouldn't Adobe set foot in the SAP community?

Those who already use Adobe software in marketing may also be inclined to swap the expensive SAP-Hybris for Magento/Marketo. Microsoft was forced out of the ERP database market with SAP Hana, came back via the cloud and with Suse Linux and is now a very successful Hana cloud provider, but Microsoft will certainly not be a stirrup holder for SAP a second time.

What was initiated as an attack on CRM world market leader Salesforce by SAP together with Microsoft and Adobe is ultimately just an admission of defeat: SAP boss Bill McDermott has correctly recognized the trend of the times, but he is years too late in implementing it.