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SAP pitches Cloud Foundry real-time customer service

It's a lot of Hybris and open-source PaaS middleware for HANA fans

SAP has become the latest enterprise giant to promise real-time “insight” into customers, via the cloud.

Europe’s tech giant is re-serving the Hybris e-commerce platform it bought in 2013 with a shot of Cloud Foundry, the open-source project it joined in 2014.

Hybris has been updated with the addition of two modules, SAP Hybris Profile and SAP Hybris Customer Experience.

Profile builds a picture of organisations’ interactions with customers, drawing on data from relational and non-relational sources, including Facebook and Twitter. Profile is “omni channel” – meaning it is supposed to work across call center, mobile, web and store-based terminals for a single view of a customer.

Meanwhile, Customer Experience is a content management system SAP reckoned lets you manage things such as targeted offers for products and services.

Underpinning both and – now – the rest of Hybris is SAP Hybris as a Service (YAAS), which SAP said on Tuesday is now in beta, with 3,000 subscribers. YAAS is the middleware and business process layer, built from scratch on the open-source Cloud Foundry and sold via SAP’s HANA cloud.

Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service which works with different languages and Frameworks, as a rival to Google’s App Engine and Salesforce’s Heroku.

Announcing YAAS, SAP said it would let customers and partners of SAP build and deliver features as micro services. The idea is that customers don’t get served the classic “big update” to its software, as has happened in years past.

“We are not forcing the whole stack on the customer,” said Stefan Schmidt, vice president of product strategy. “It’s a fundamental shift in how we develop and deliver software to the customer in the front end.”

Profile is, according to Schmidt, SAP’s first app for Hybris as a Service, with more planned, but it seems SAP is moving slowly. Schmidt reckoned Hybris is for simple, targeted applications such as behavior analysis, rather than for huge, data-intensive apps – not yet, anyway. Hence, the talk of micro-services.

According to Schmidt, Hybris is like the early days of Java – it began in applets but evolved to sophisticated, server-side enterprise and web deployments.

SAP said Profile would update in real time to take into account new customer actions and interactions – unlike what it termed “traditional” content management systems.

Europe’s largest technology firm isn’t the only one now pushing on real-time customer data and “customer experience".

CRM-as-a-service firm Salesforce has re-written its CRM front end around a gaming engine to permit updates without needing to refresh a page. The changes – named Lightning – are due to roll out next month. Salesforce, hosting its annual Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco, California, is also pushing its real-time analytics-as-a-service Wave cloud.

One of Salesforce’s strengths is its underlying framework, which lets the firm service data to mobile and browser screens – supposedly delivering a single view of customer.

SAP bought Hybris as its core architecture delivered a consistent view of inventory, price, order and other information across channels, with a process management layer that also worked across web, mobile, call centre and store.

It joined the VMware/Pivotal-led Cloud Foundry in July 2014. SAP contributed code to the platform-as-a-service and developed a Cloud Foundry Broker for SAP HANA to let Cloud Foundry apps connect to SAP’s in-memory database. ®

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