SAP Customer Experience LIVE! 2018 Expectations Fulfilled?

SAP Customer Experience LIVE! 2018 event was hosted in Barcelona earlier this month. A few weeks before the event kickstarted, I wrote a post about my key expectations from the event. In this blog, you’ll get brief insights on the key takeaways from the event and also my verdict on whether my expectations remain fulfilled or not.

What happened?

More than 250 sessions were held during the two-day event, ranging from very exciting keynote addresses through product demos, panel discussions, customer stories and technical sessions where users got the possibility to discuss their current challenges in comfortably-sized groups.

Capgemini, as a platinum sponsor, held multiple sessions and demos for the crowd, i.e. “How to deliver a unique and ‘individual’ customer experience” by Naresh Khanduri and the “Importance of conversational commerce in the customer experience space” – by Dave Harrelson. Our booth was well-attended by customers and we had meaningful discussions with them and SAP.

From my seat

My prime goal was to connect with several of our Scandinavian customers. We got the chance to discuss their challenges and exchange experiences from the event and the expectations on the SAP C/4HANA platform. Another was to hear and see the latest announcements from SAP on their Customer Experience product portfolio and, last but not least – the product roadmaps. One major highlight for me was the opportunity to connect with SAP as a partner, and with my global colleagues from Capgemini with very deep experience from working with Customer Experience and the SAP C/4HANA platform.

In short, it was a great event!

Most Interesting…
The most interesting announcements for me were the launch of the UPSCALE commerce accelerator, enabling extremely quick deployment of e-commerce, as well as project “Kyma”, an open-source initiative, which should give users agile, open-source tools to easily customize and extend API-enabled applications.

SAP continues the journey announced during SAPPHIRE 2018 of bringing SAP C/4HANA to the market, as a cloud platform. This will cover most of the customer needs, make the functionality well-connected, shorten the project implementation time, decrease the total cost of ownership – all this while giving great usability and providing the customers with excellent customer experience.