Social Collaboration: SAP's Jam Session

We had the opportunity to speak with Sameer Patel, SAP's Global Vice President and General Manager for Social and Collaborative Software, about the software vendor's strategy. The cornerstone of SAP's social collaboration initiative is the Jam product.

The Walldorf-based software group had already taken the first steps in this direction with Streamwork, an on-demand solution for collaborative decision-making and problem solving.

With the purchase of SuccessFactors, Streamwork was discontinued and the functions transferred to Jam. SAP is now taking the approach of integrating collaboration into the business process context.

Sameer Patel estimates that salespeople spend five to 25 percent of their time with CRM software solutions. The rest of the time is spent on collaboration, i.e., meetings with customers, discussions with employees, exchanging documents, and searching for specialists within the company.

The tools to support these tasks don't usually come from SAP. The vendor now hopes that Jam will change that by adding social collaboration capabilities to SAP business applications.

Social ABAP Apps

While SAP users today use SAP applications for structured processes such as finance and customer management, in the future they will use Jam for unstructured tasks such as collaboration with business partners and colleagues.

Jam can be integrated into any ABAP-based application from SAP and its partners. And this already shows where SAP's focus will be with social collaboration: in providing collaboration functions for business processes.

Combining business applications and collaboration makes perfect sense in certain application scenarios - even in business contexts with a high degree of standardization and automation.

One example of this is exception handling of invoices in financial management, for example, in the event of discrepancies or incorrect information.

SAP is not alone

Of course, SAP is not the only vendor taking this approach. Companies such as IBM, Atos and Salesforce.com are working on similar concepts to combine business processes and social collaboration.

But SAP has a strong starting position thanks to its installed base of business applications and customers. At PAC, we believe that in this competition it will not be the vendors with the most sophisticated features and functions that will come out on top, but those with the most exciting use cases for social collaboration in the business application environment.

The areas of CRM, PLM and SCM are particularly predestined for rapid success. SAP must succeed in proving to the customer that its own technology is best suited to link SAP applications with social collaboration. It stands to reason that other providers of social collaboration tools will also court SAP customers.

A commentary by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC)