MADRID, Nov. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --  SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the new SAP® 360 Customer solution. Powered by the SAP HANA® platform, the solution will harness the power of in-memory computing, cloud, enterprise mobility and collaboration to allow organizations to revolutionize the way they engage with their customers beyond traditional customer relationship management (CRM). The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd, being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 13-16.

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In today's highly competitive business climate, customer experience becomes the new competitive differentiation for organizations. "Customer expectations continue to rise. It's simply not enough to only react to customer issues," said Don Peppers, co-founder, Peppers & Rogers Group. "By understanding customers' needs, preferences and social profile, companies seek to proactively engage with them to create personalized and differentiated experiences that lead to trust."

This engagement enables companies to improve customer loyalty, maximize customers' lifetime value and optimize their resources to create more value for the customers and the shareholders alike. The breakthrough in-memory technology of SAP HANA will turn this vision into a reality for enterprises around the globe.

"This is a game-changing solution that will help companies market better, sell better, service better and truly create remarkable experiences for their customers," said Bill McDermott, co-CEO, SAP. "With SAP 360 Customer powered by SAP HANA, companies gain true 360-degree customer insight that is real-time, actionable and available anywhere."

SAP 360 Customer will provide unique capabilities to turn insight into action and engage with customers one-to-one — in context and in real time. It will enable organizations to create a superior customer experience while driving operational excellence by empowering the mobile workforce, fostering collaboration, executing transactions faster and providing better response times. The solution is already transforming the way companies engage with customers. Lenovo, a US$29 billion personal technology company and the world's second-largest PC vendor, has been an early adopter of the SAP HANA platform to support the fast growth of the organization.  

"Knowing exactly what is happening in our business at any moment and being able to respond quickly to changing market conditions is critical for the success of Lenovo," said Xiaoyu Liu, vice president, Global Application Development, Lenovo. "SAP HANA has proven to be a high-performing platform to help us achieve this goal. That's why we are exploring supercharging customer relationship management with SAP HANA. We have already seen 30 times faster performance in key processes during the customer validation phase. The first results are very promising, allowing our business to not only get 360-degree real-time business insight, but also significantly accelerating all our customer-facing operations."

"We have realized the long-held vision of our founder Hasso Plattner to deliver a real-time enterprise with transaction, text and analytics processing on one platform," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology and Innovation. "Support pack stack 5, to be announced this week, is a non-disruptive increment for SAP HANA and yet a large step forward, as it aims to enable  integrated application services, key enterprise capabilities for high availability, disaster recovery and integrated text analytics, as well as key OLTP optimizations that enable us to release our first mission-critical SAP Business Suite application, SAP CRM, to run completely on the SAP HANA platform."

Three Essential Elements of SAP 360 Customer
Customers will benefit from three elements of SAP 360 Customer, including:

• Real-time insight: Organizations will gain proprietary customer insights, understand customer needs and preferences and predict future behavior. This real-time and true 360-degree view of the customer will be based on the most accurate front-office interactions, back-office transactions and publicly available information from social networks. Organizations will be able to access large amounts of data in shorter periods of time, dramatically increase the speed of existing processes and revolutionize decision-making — anywhere, on any device.
• Real-time interactions: Companies will be able to leverage just-in-time customer insight to deliver one-to-one interactions through any channel. Organizations will be able to deliver a differentiated customer experience and provide customers with highly personalized offerings, which will accurately reflect the specific customer needs and wants. They will be able to act on information as it happens and proactively engage with customers to resolve issues, introduce new products and services and decide on future courses of action.
• Real-time execution: Companies will be able to instantly carry out end-to-end customer processes beyond the front office, truly deliver on their brand promise and create differentiated customer experiences. By leveraging industry best practices inherent in SAP solutions, organizations will be able to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of every customer process. This will enable companies to truly transform and empower the front line employees to better engage with customers across marketing, sales and service functions.

A key component of the SAP 360 Customer solution will be the SAP® CRM application powered by SAP HANA. Other products to be included are cloud-based solutions such as the SAP® Customer OnDemand solution, the SAP® Jam social software platform and several mobile solutions.

SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA is also planned for availability as a rapid-deployment solution for new customers and CRM installations, as well as to support existing customer pilots. SAP® Rapid Deployment solutions are designed for customers to go live within 12 weeks or less and offer a complete package of pre-configured software, implementation services, content and end-user enablement for a fixed price and scope.

More Opportunities for Partners
SAP 360 Customer will be implemented and offered by SAP and partners. With the solution, partners will have an opportunity to innovate and grow their business while helping their customers gain competitive differentiation and grow. To read what partners have to say, see "Quote Sheet: SAP to Power the Customer Experience Transformation."

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid, visit the Events newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd Madrid
In 2012, SAP again brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event being held in Madrid, Spain, from November 13-16. With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners, and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. SAP® TechEd brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together to learn in an interactive environment directly from the experts responsible for cutting-edge SAP technology. The co-located event provides access to the entire SAP ecosystem and enables attendees to learn how SAP can help their organizations run like never before. Follow on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and @SAPTechEd, and join the conversation at #SAPPHIRENOW and #SAPTechEd.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 197,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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For more information, press only:
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SOURCE SAP AG