In a press release on Sep 22, SAP announced that “The CRM experiment has failed. Today’s empowered customer requires a new model for engagement”.

What SAP is referring to is its launch of multiple solutions in the digital and social arena. There is no doubt that the story is compelling. Enterprise customers everywhere are looking at ways to simplify their technology landscape while providing contextual, real time information to their employees and customers. All functions including sales, marketing, service and supply chain need to come together to enable that experience.

And what’s different about the new SAP solutions is that they seem to now come together to leverage the same underlying information across all functions. The user experience is obviously much better, and more contemporary. By the way, sorry SAP, but its really the same as what others have been touting.

But there are 2 primary challenges underlying all this marketing hype from all the big vendors like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft:

First, enterprise clients are still implementing solutions in silos without an enterprise roadmap story. This means that departments or even smaller business units will deploy these solutions even as the rest of the organization evolves separately. While the product vendors would positively love to provide a singular solution, the magnitude and complexity of that engagement is huge. And it requires a resounding nod from the top, which may be too much of a battle for the CEOs. After all, no one wants to see such an initiative fail in execution. Consider the social cloud by SAP. Yes, employees can now view their customers’ social activity in one place now. But, hello? That’s a 6 year old technology. Anyone remember Radian 6, HootSuite, Klout and others.

What’s indeed compelling with the solution is that hopefully all that social data and all that analysis is being fed into and derived from a central place that can map it to real customers.

The sales cloud, (or Salesforce or Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics) is basically just a good looking CRM on the web. Again, if the organization can commit to using that single cloud database as their final destination, the real ROI would be achieved. But in reality, what’s bound to happen is that the solutions will be “integrated” to death. With data flowing in so many directions, and to so many dashboards, I’m already seeing a new industry emerging.

Second, what is still missing from this big beautiful marketing picture is the story on consumer transactions. For a pure B2B company, it may not matter so much. But for most companies that manufacture and sell products to consumers, the pieces of the puzzle are still in disarray. The Omni-Channel solutions URL on SAP takes us to the hybris website, which though impressive, by no means supports the enterprise CRM story.

SAP is probably on the right path through hybris (http://www.hybris.com/en/products/b2c-application), but their claims to be the next gen customer engagement platform for the enterprise are only partially satisfied. Social media is only part of the puzzle. Most companies face significant issues with inventory management, manufacturing and distribution optimization. It looks like solutions to those challenges will continue to elude us for some time. Salesforce, with its “internet of customers” theme, is one step closer to the solution from one direction. But it hasn’t really found a solution to the commerce and consumer engagement story.

The CRM story will not come together unless both these challenges are resolved. And so long as vendors keep using the terms B2B and B2C, the challenges will remain.

However, the videos are really innovative, the marketing hype pretty convincing, and clients do look happy and bright as they get their time in the spotlight. That’s worth something, right?