CRM Comes To You: SAP And RIM Announce Expanded Partnership

By Tracey E. Schelmetic 

SAP (News - Alert) and Research in Motion recently announced an agreement that should prove to be very welcome to companies looking to meet the needs of mobile sales professionals. The announcement, issued during a joint press conference at SAP’s Manhattan offices in May, was made by Bob Stutz, Executive Vice President and General manager, Industries and CRM, of SAP; Bill McDermott, President and CEO, SAP Americas (News - Alert); and Jim Balsillie, CEO and Chairman of RIM.

Bill McDermott started the conference by holding up his BlackBerry. “Everyone I know is addicted to this device, including myself,” he said. The truth was in the reaction of the audience, which collectively murmured and smiled. “Who wakes up to this device using the alarm function?” asked McDermott. Many hands went up.

The relationship between the two companies, of course, is not brand new. For starters, the two companies have been clients of one another (users of one another’s solutions) for years. During the previous several years, a sales professional could access SAP CRM on his or her BlackBerry. There was, however, no native integration.

That is about to change, said McDermott. “CRM is now natively integrated onto the BlackBerry device itself, which changes the game. What that means is that sales users, for example, will automatically be fed their leads when they log in to view their reports or their calendars. They are doing it within the confines of the BlackBerry itself. What RIM and SAP are now committed to doing is natively integrating the entire business suite of SAP onto the BlackBerry device,” revealed McDermott.

Company executives highlighted the importance - and the potential - of the announcement by citing analyst statistics. According to IDC (News - Alert), there are 800 million mobile professionals in the world today, and that number is expected to grow to one billion by 2010. This announcement will certainly be good news to a large portion of them.

Said McDermott, “SAP, the world leader in enterprise applications, and RIM, the world leader in enterprise communications, have converged the world of applications and the world of mobility on the BlackBerry device. Applications, business processes and productivity are now on your hip. You can compete and win in the marketplace.”

Organizations that already have the SAP CRM and the BlackBerry solutions deployed will require only basic user training and minimal incremental IT infrastructure investments.

Said Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO and Chairman of RIM, “The word is ‘native.’” He addressed the difference between the previous integration with SAP and today’s announcement, underscoring the native integration. The change is that the former relationship was “session pull,” which meant users had a laborious connection and log-in process to initiate sessions (and the data exchange was not exactly “real time”). Today’s announcement has turned the process to “session-less push to your belt.” Basically, a user can wake up in the morning, pick up his or her BlackBerry, and within a few clicks, be in the middle of SAP CRM in real-time. “Why didn’t we do it natively earlier?” asked Balsillie rhetorically. “We had to develop the APIs. And this is just the right time for it.”

Balsillie spoke of the spirit of cooperation between the two companies and how much he values RIM’s relationship with SAP. Every aspect of crafting the partnership was about, he said, “How do we provide value to customers? Of course you care about sales, but it starts with integrity and it starts with a value proposition.”

According to the executives of both companies, the existing overlap of customers is “almost perfect.”

The next executive to comment on the announcement was Bob Stutz, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Industries and CRM, for SAP. He indicated that the partnership was very natural. “We’re the leader in enterprise applications, and RIM is the leader in enterprise connectivity,” said Stutz. “We sat down and said, ‘How can we do something?’ We’re living in a digital age. People need to have access to information real-time on their device. We went to RIM and said, ‘We understand applications, we really don’t understand this connectivity piece. What we really want to do is build a native CRM application on a BlackBerry. We don’t want to do it, we want you to do it.’ CRM is so powerful, but only if users have universal access to their data. Prior to this, that vision had not yet been achieved in CRM.”

SAP’s CRM application was the lucky first for the partnership. More pieces of SAP’s business suite are to follow, as the partnership will be extended to other applications in the full business suite. Eventually, every SAP application will be running natively on a BlackBerry. “CRM is just the start here,” said Stutz. “We will continue to build this out: ERP supply chain, industry applications.”

An SAP engineer demonstrated the application for the audience on his BlackBerry. “With just a few clicks, you can be into your calendar items for the day. CRM comes to me, I don’t have to go to it.”

As it turns out, SAP is its own beta customer with the solution. And not long after the announcement, they had an opportunity to test the partnership. “At SAPPHIRE next week, where we’ll have 15,000 of our closest friends, we’ll look to feature this in a big way,” said Bill McDermott. General availability was stated to be “imminent…within a few months.”

At the question and answer portion of the conference, a question came from an audience member with regards to availability and the highly publicized BlackBerry outage of last year. “What happens,” queried the audience member, “If there is a network problem with BlackBerry like there was last year?”

Balsillie stepped up to answer, indicating that RIM takes that issue very seriously. “There has been an absolute tremendous expansion [since then],” he said. “We take the need for absolute total availability and we take our responsibility very seriously. We have had brief outages where packets were lost. Was there any security corruption? No. Was any information lost? No. Have measures been taken to prevent that in the future? Yes. We’re not perfect, but we aspire to perfection. When things happen, we immediately go to system integrity that no security is corrupted, no packets are lost. Words can’t explain how seriously important this is to us.”

McDermott turned the focus to the importance of CRM to an organization. (I think it’s very telling that SAP chose to launch their CRM module first rather than others they could have chosen.) “Why has the promise of CRM, to some extent, not be fulfilled?” he asked. “Because the sales force is mobile. They don’t want to be tethered to a desk entering data. They want to be out on the street selling something to someone.”

And they want their CRM to come to them, not the other way around. CiS

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