Microsoft, SAP And Oracle Join Cloud-Industry Obsession Over New Performance Metric

The clearest and most unequivocal proof that the business cloud business has grown and is fully ready for industrial strength deployments are the recent promises of top executives from Microsoft, SAP and Oracle to achieve customer success, not satisfaction or Customer loyalty, but the customer's success, their highest priority in 2018.

Those giants of the technology industry have joined the native SaaS providers of the Workday cloud, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow by committing unconditionally to this new top priority metric in the following ways:

renewing vendor compensation based on consumption of cloud services and business success, rather than on what Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood called "the billing cycle";

create new roles and positions within the organization specifically designed so that all the resources of the cloud provider are related to the successful implementation, lifetimes and operations in progress;

launch of new programs designed specifically to allow and improve customer-to-client communications.

These latest public pledges from three of the largest enterprise technology companies in the world - Microsoft, SAP and Oracle - underscore a prediction I made last year that customer success would become the most important and defining issue for the entire industry. in 2018.

I presented this new premise for cloud leadership in an article called Cloud Computing Outlook 2018: The 10 best predictions to win The Cloud and here is a brief excerpt to provide a context on how transformative and radical this new movement has become:

Yes, the brilliant technology in the cloud will remain essential, but I would say that as the cloud market evolves at an impressive pace, that brilliant technology and resulting cloud services are becoming table bets in Cloud Wars .

And as a result, the true measure of strategic differentiation in the cloud will be how well cloud marketers can, as noted above, allocate their offers to their customers: the business priorities of large, medium and small businesses in all industries and in all regions of the planet

In particular, the winners of Cloud Wars in 2018 will need to master the art, and not just the science, of helping corporate clients to undertake, accelerate and complete their digital transformations; it should radiate customer-centric messages and behaviors through its technology-centric organizations; and should take advantage of artificial intelligence that changes games in everything it does.

Here's a quick look at what Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle recently said about their individual commitments to customer success, plus some comments from Salesforce.com, Workday, and ServiceNow about their plans:

Microsoft

When Microsoft renewed its global sales organization in July 2017, the result was "fundamentally changing the way we go to market for all types of customers," said CFO Amy Hood at an investor conference in December.

Microsoft's goals were to ensure greater customer success by putting more technical expertise into and even within the customer's deployment and during the initial stages, said Hood, and here are some of its key points:

•         "At the higher end that means adding a lot of resources that are technical, and when I say technical, I mean you probably do not see the distinction between them and someone who works in Redmond writing lines of code that can be sent."
•         "They are fully capable of implementing and doing most of the project start-up costs, which means efforts, they are able to launch projects, and they are able to demonstrate all of Azure's deep functions." That kind of person was not someone which, frankly, I had in Microsoft and I used it that way. "
•         "So that big investment is basically about consumption and that's how you pay people, you do not get paid for selling an Azure contract, so you do not have reservations, but because the customers are successful, which means that they start the projects., the meter starts spinning in Azure, and that's when they're rewarded. "
•         "The only thing that matters to me different from this year than I think in the past is that we are really focused on Azure consumption instead of the billing cycle, which is an important distinction." He always recognizes revenue based on consumption: you don "I recognize income just by selling something."
•         "So that's why I'm very attached to the concept that this is a different way of rewarding our people, because it is more structurally aligned with the client's success, and finally, in a consumer-based business, success the customer is all that matters, because it is based on itself over time. "

To learn more about these unprecedented changes at Microsoft to ensure a higher level of customer success, see Microsoft launches new growth in the cloud through the Go-To-Market program, which includes customers as partners.

SAP

During the recent fourth quarter earnings call from SAP, CEO Bill McDermott described a similar dynamic in response to an analyst's question about whether SAP offered vendors greater incentives to sell cloud versions of SAP products:

"When it comes to the cloud and how I think we could really think of the incentives for the sales force, we have created an environment where it really matters that those priorities and the customer's success are the most important priority and that It is also now reflected heavily in compensation for the sales representative, as well as for the entire value chain of the administration, "said McDermott.

"For us, a 'customer for life' is much more a focus on the sales department, we take nothing away, but we make it very clear that we are really interested in dynamites for our customers who then give excellent references."

The most vital outcome for the vendor, McDermott said, is to ensure that the customer gets "the product he needs in the way he needs it ... Then, if the customer gets what he needs in each line of business, then in each the table of meetings, the CEO will be happy with the strategy and the management team of the CEO will be happy because we are focused on the client of the clients ".

Oracle

Shortly after Oracle's call for profit in mid-December, I wrote an article titled The Top 10 Reasons why Oracle and its cloud business are in great shape, including this general description of a first-rate initiative for clients in Oracle:

"The choice of the customer is becoming the center of everything Oracle does Two years ago, Oracle began to modernize its internal business processes, moving away from the hard-line approach of its local days and those of the philosophy of the customer-centric cloud With its unique suite of products and services that provide customers with a wide range of options to meet their unique needs and tastes, in addition to this new internal orientation to customer success to ensure renewal, Oracle exceeds one of the main obstacles you face in your own journey to the cloud. "

And in a presentation at Oracle's annual meeting with financial analysts in late 2017, Oracle's executive vice president of applications, Steve Miranda, made these points about the incredible importance of ensuring customer success:

•         "When we are now running our clients' businesses as part of our cloud, that is literally what we are doing: we are running their businesses, we are much more intimate partners with our customers, and we have introduced new roles as a client." Success Managers, Implementation Success Managers, Customer Feedback Programs. "
•         "Because when the customer gets the software now, we really feel inspired and work with our customers to get up and running, and I think that's what he's seen with the results in the future."
•         "There are examples like Customer Connect, which is an online forum in which we allow our clients, really as a kind of social network, to get involved not only directly with our product managers but also with each other." We have two events per week. These are products, managers provide updates on new features and new functions, or clients that present us and other customers with innovative ways to use the applications, and now we have expanded it to more than 25,000 customers. "

Salesforce

Here are a couple of key points about Salesforce's philosophy of customer success from an article I wrote six months ago called Inside Salesforce.com's Obsession to the Customer: 10 powerful lessons from Marc Benioff:

"Nothing is more important to Salesforce than customer success, even though half of our 27,000 employees were probably not with us two years ago," Benioff said during the conference. "That's something we really spend time with because when you're in business software, you have to realize that it's hard work and that everything is not going to be perfect all the time and that there will be problems.

"And that's why I believe that being so committed to the client is more important than ever, and I think that's really the reason why you're going to see extraordinary growth in the coming years because it's really this culture that makes us It is driving. "

Workday

Several months ago, in a piece called Brilliant Workday Gambit: take advantage of the hypercrecence to assume SAP and Oracle, I shared Bhusri's comments to financial analysts about the extraordinary power that customer success can have as a revenue-generating engine: an extract of that piece:

"Success generates success in terms of deploying really happy clients and customers," Bhusri said, "and I think we're starting to see a 'network effect' of Fortune 500 companies talking to each other and comparing notes on what solutions work. and which ones not. " .... And that 'network effect' that Bhusri mentioned means that "we are reaching such large numbers [on the Fortune 500 list] that customers really talk a lot between them."

Bhusri then offered a convincing anecdote about the CIO of a Fortune 10 company whom Bhusri had unsuccessfully tried to see for 5 years.

"He finally calls me and says: 'Hello Aneel, I have had so many of your clients tell me about the great experience they have had with Workday, and the good company to do business with you, and how your products are fully operational, so Why do not you come to see me? "(End of extract)

ServiceNow

Shortly after CEO John Donahoe joined the company last year, he began to take home the power of customer success and how it would have to become an essential element of ServiceNow's character if the company expected to continue to compete and grow in a much bigger cloud. sellers In Inside ServiceNow's Surge: How it has become the most innovative SaaS provider on the planet, I offered these perspectives from Donahoe:

"The area where we are increasing our focus is on the type of customer's complete life cycle, from post-sale to renewal, where what I heard from customers was: 'Help me implement and help me get the most value out of the product, and then help me translate that into commercial value, that we can prove, '"he said.

"But what we're going to do is put a little more focus on the customer's success, so we're capturing, documenting and coding the commercial value that is created, which helps a CIO or IT department within their organization to demonstrate the value they conduct within their company and frankly they help us in the additional sales, in the realization of the prices and in the disembarkation of new accounts ".

As companies jump into the cloud to accelerate innovation and engage more closely with customers, my Cloud Wars series analyzes the top cloud providers from the perspective of business customers.