Published April 18, 2014 by NBC Bay Area

SAP’s app helps the San Jose Sharks with the team’s hockey strategy. Scott Budman reports.

Click here to watch the report

Published April 10, 2014 by InsideView

We‘ve done our research, and results are in for the inaugural “Top 25 Marketing Influencers” list. This authoritative list recognizes contributions and achievements of the brightest minds in the marketing industry. These are the folks who are leading the charge – they develop marketing automation solutions, continually challenge the status quo, and always share best practices or amazing revelations about the field. These marketing leaders are the ones who are setting the bar and moving the field forward.

And what better time to set the precedent for honoring marketing influencers than at the start of Marketo’s Marketing Summit Nation event. So without further ado, scan our infographic to see who made the cut (+25 watchlist marketers)!

Click here to read the full info-graphic and article.

Published March 26, 2014 by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Translation of original article by Martin Gropp

Not too long ago, most software providers sold their programs on CD; only a few were selling products over the Internet. Even the U.S.-based company Adobe, developer of the PDF file format and the accompanying Reader software, was still doing well with these old ways. And so things remained, even though the basic version of the Reader had long been available as a free software on the Internet. It was not until 2009 that the Adobe board of directors mentioned the concept of ‘software-as-a-service’ in their annual letter to shareholders, and even then it was only with the remark that demand for software services on the Internet was still a “budding market.”

Now, these delicate blossoms have bloomed into a billion-dollar business. The Boston Consulting Group estimated the value of software-as-a-service (SaaS) at $15 billion last year, and predicted that this market would grow three times as fast as the market for traditional software. Phenomena such as cloud computing (the decentralized use of computing power over the Internet) and big data (the process of analyzing massive quantities of data) put the software industry under a lot of pressure to adapt and innovate. Software providers must adapt their programs to the needs of different companies. The software must be able to operate on desktop computers in an office as well as on smartphones and tablets on the go. Ideally, employees should be able to access important data from anywhere.

And it is in this context that Adobe began the new collaboration that it announced on Tuesday. The company will soon be working together with German software provider SAP to distribute its digital marketing solution. As part of this partnership, SAP will be offering companies the Marketing Cloud together with its database solution, Hana, enabling these companies to analyze large quantities of their data at fast speeds. According to a statement, the goal of combining these two solutions is to empower business clients to be able to “analyze data from different marketing channels and interact with customers in real-time.” The company’s new business partner promises that this will help companies improve their business.

According to Senior VP Brad Rencher, who heads up Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business Unit, the Hana solution will provide retailers with “data-driven insights” that will allow them to increase their revenue, both online and in physical stores. The in-memory technology utilized in the Hana database system is particularly well-suited to the challenge of consolidating and analyzing data from different sources, for example, from social networks or the company’s own customer service databases.

According to Jonathan Becher, who oversees marketing at SAP, companies will be expected to make more and more decisions in real-time in the future. Becher refers to an example involving a chain of British toy retailers. Even otherwise loyal customers now take out their smartphones to check the competitors’ prices while still in the store. The key is to reach these customers using individualized offers sent via digital channels.

The SAP manager sees this cooperation with Adobe as a sign of things to come in the industry. “These types of collaborations are going to become more popular,” explains Becher. Becher doesn’t see it as competing against oneself and potentially losing business, even though his own company also produces solutions for digital marketing. “This way we all get a piece of the pie.” And at the moment, that piece seems to be getting larger rather than smaller.

Link to original German translation

Published March 12, 2014 by Uberflip

Want to take your brand to the top? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of 10 CMOs at the top of their game and their key insights on how to be a kick-ass marketer.

Click here to read the full list

Published March 7, 2014 by Fast Company 

When SAP launched their sports analytics division in 2013, they never dreamed that it would end up creating a whole new adjacent business: small business analytics. That’s right: SAP’s work with the NBA taught them how to sell into mom-and-pop businesses, a market they had previously never touched.

So how did they get from the NBA to SMB?

Sports As a Playground

Consider the analytical experiment that is NBA.com/STATS and the Video Box Score–the system now captures every dribble. By working to document, process, and display virtually every imaginable statistic in basketball games, SAP is showing businesses of all kinds the seemingly endless variety of real-time analytics at their fingertips. And these solutions aren’t relegated to sports alone.

Click here to read the full article

Published March 7, 2014 by B2B Marketing

Being a female marketer in a male-dominated industry can be difficult. Maxine-Laurie Marshall sought advice from female leaders about dealing with the most common barriers stopping women from progressing their careers.

Mentoring
Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP, believes the lack of females in their twenties with mentors is potentially harming their future career success: “I saw a survey recently of about 1800 modestly to very successful professionals over the age of 40 in California – heavily weighted toward the technology field. In the study, there was a strong correlation between the degree of success and the presence of a mentor in the respondent’s twenties. If I look at women in their twenties who have business mentors compared to men, it seems substantially lower.”

Click here to read the full article

Published on March 1, 2014 by PR Week

SAP’s Jonathan Becher speaks to Lindsay Stein about plans to simplify comms strategies and leveraging social media to listen to consumers.

How do marketing and communications work together at SAP?
When I joined the company six years ago, there wasn’t a single marketing department.

Marketing was embedded in the business units and regional functions, and there was a small corporate marketing unit that primarily looked after the brand.

Depending on how you interacted with the company, you got a slightly different story, so we felt more like a federation of loosely connected organizations.

In phase one, SAP created a single-brand entity for itself. Phase two was the story of what the brand is, and the third part was about bringing those disconnected components – primarily for marketing – together.

Part of what I worked on in the first 18 months was making the unit feel like one, because there are synergies when you work together. These efforts will continue in 2014, where we will continue to create more synergies between the two units.

They are not the same discipline, but we call them two sides of the same coin. We have started doing a better job. It’s a journey we are on. I won’t claim we have it all figured out, but it feels more holistic.

Click here to read the full interview

Published February 27, 2014 by USA Today

NEW ORLEANS — Chris Bosh is a 6-foot-11 basketball superstar who has won two NBA Championships with the Miami Heat and an Olympic gold medal in 2008. He’s a nine-time All-Star with a silky smooth jump shot.

In other words, he’s as accomplished as any baller this side of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Yet when he heard about a new player-efficiency software program in development at All-Star festivities earlier this month here, he sought out its maker, SAP, and asked for an instant demo.

“I’m open to using any tool that helps, especially since we live in the information age,” says Bosh, who attended Georgia Tech for a year before going pro. “This is amazing stuff.”

The pilot program that riveted Bosh, called SportVU, records every movement and action of a player during a 48-minute game. In all, 792,000 data points for the game’s participants are plotted. With a few clicks, an athlete can be evaluated based on their shooting, spacing on the court, speed, dribbling and other factors. A video component of each play is available in a small screen within the program.

The intersection of elite athletes and data parsing is becoming as common in sports as videotape review and pregame shoot arounds. Every major league is increasingly driven to find a sliver of an edge in training and in-game performance. “Tech comes in waves in the way it can transform an industry — first it was banking, then retail, now sports,” SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher says.

Click here to read the full article

Published February 25, 2014 by C2MTL

Today, C2MTL announces the addition of four new leaders, bringing to 25 the number of prestigious lecturers attending the event in Montréal this coming May 27 to 29. The four new key figures from the spheres of business and creativity areNathalie Bondil, director and chief curator of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA),Kevin O’Brien, Aimia’s senior Vice President and Chief Business Development Officer for Canada, Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for SAP and James Murphy, former leader of LCD Soundsystem and also co-producer of Reflektor by Arcade Fire.

Click here to read the full announcement

Published February 19, 2014 by Chiefmartec.com

When I posted my presentation The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix a few months ago, one of the people who commented on it was Nancy Fessatidis, VP of Marketing Operations at SAP:

Great post Scott. The CMT role has served us well at SAP. We call this our Business Information Officer (BIO). It’s a critical role not just in Marketing but in every key line of business — to help translate our business needs into an enterprise architecture roadmap.

My ears pricked up, as public sightings of chief marketing technologists are still relatively rare. When Gartner released their latest research last month showing that 81% of large companies now have a chief marketing technologist type role, my reaction was both (a) awesome and (b) where are they hiding?

In a subsequent exchange on Twitter, around a Harvard Business blog post on why CMOs and CIOs Need to Get Along to Make Big Data Work, the CMO of SAP, Jonathan Becher, actually chimed in to offer an introduction to their chief marketing technologist:

Click here to read the full article