SAP Company Hybris Launches Contextual Marketing Platform

The SAP-owned hybris, a provider of multichannel e-commerce software, today launched its SAP hybris Marketing solution to improve relationships between customers and brands.

The SAP hybris Marketing solution will run on SAP HANA, the company's data analysis processing platform, as part of the SAP solutions for customer engagement and commerce (CEC) package. Offered alongside SAP Cloud for Customer and hybris Commerce Suite, the program will take customer data from browser history—including site visits and search entries—and make it available in one central location. The aim is to provide marketers with a clear picture of individual customers' past and present behaviors, as well as predict their future behaviors so they can craft more relevant and targeted campaigns.

The release holds true to statements the companies made when SAP acquired hybris in 2013, as it is another effort to better connect enterprises with their customers. "I think this will help brands massively around providing relevant and personalized experiences for their customers," Marcus Ruebsam, senior vice president of marketing solution management at hybris and SAP (CEC), says. "We believe that it comes at the right time—a time where organizations take digital transformation as an imperative, and understand that everything has to be fueled by data."

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, agrees that this is a step that will round out the company's offerings, and make them a stronger overall contender to CRM giants like Oracle and Salesforce.com. "SAP traditionally has not had a good product for marketing," Wang says. "This isn't a full-on marketing product, but it allows SAP to better integrate with other marketing products."

The announcement was scheduled for today to align with the company's annual event in Germany, Ruebsam says. "We have over 1,000 customers attending, a couple hundred partners attending, so we thought today was the occasion." Among the company's customers are Levi Strauss & Co, Samsung Electronics, and ASICS.

ASICS General Manager of Global Enterprise Solutions James Stone said in a statement, "The SAP hybrids Marketing solution provides us with a powerful capability to collate, analyze, and act upon granular data for the first time."

As for the other customers looking to adopt the solution, Ruebsam hopes they see "higher conversion rates in their marketing campaigns, [and] higher conversion rates in selling through the commerce platform." He also hopes that the product provides customer service reps with contacts which in time will provide them the ability to get more business and revenue.

"To do a really full contextual marketing platform, you have to do a lot more than what's being offered," Wang says. "It's a good start, but for context to really work, you need to capture anything from sentiment to role, to the relationship. All this stuff requires a huge dataset, so it takes time."

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