Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you were going to do a couple more customer examples. Are you going to do one from the CRM side? Let’s hear about the deal cycle optimization.

Sameer Patel: CRM will be an interesting scenario. There’s a customer,Kaiser Compressor, who are a large manufacturing organization in Europe. Kaiser was going through a business transformation where their business was going to move from a manufacturer of products to a services business. Customer relationships are going to be at the center of what they do, not just the product they sell.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If I were looking at the multi-vision and the psychology of what’s happening, if there’s an incentive to create content and knowledge, and then you get credit in your appraisals and promotions. Those are the more direct psychological incentives, I think.

Sameer Patel: I agree. Again, we haven’t spent enough time looking at the value of these technologies in the context of what’s in it for the employee. Outside of the soft benefits and maybe the bragging rights of the stars and badges, they only go so far. You should use it in a way where it can actually drive both employee productivity, which is natural for them to understand, and also be cognizant about what the companies are trying to drive.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one thing that I haven’t heard you talk about in this whole picture is the incentives for the employees to create this kind of knowledge. That must be part of the system, right?

Sameer Patel: That’s a really good point. In the last few weeks, we met some pretty big investments in how you can use, what the market calls, gamification in a very different way, rather than just badges and challenges. Today, a lot of gamification is useful, but it has its limitations because it’s 100% dependent on social. To incentivize people to utilize the social network, we look at the value of incentive based on not just what someone is doing in the social system but what they’re also doing in the transactional system.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the example that you gave us about training, you talked about crowd sourcing through videos of enterprise tips and knowledge. That’s essentially the use skills that you described. It sounds like the real power of the system that you are trying to develop is both providing the employees and the enterprise the tools with which to both record and develop small nuggets of knowledge and then, making that searchable for the ones who are trying to find that knowledge. Is that a correct observation?

Sameer Patel: That’s absolutely correct.

Sramana Mitra: Your view of the training and knowledge management in this case is more the structure of how to crowd source knowledge and then the structure of how employees find that knowledge at the point of consumption.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 1)

SAP plans to step-up business integration a notch further with an extension to SAP Jam that aims to deliver personalized information to enhance organizational productivity. Join us in this interview with SAP’s Senior VP and GM, Sameer Patel, as he gives us a blow-by-blow account on this new addition to its arsenal and other latest developments in the ERP landscape.
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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: enMarkit, Singapore

enMarkit is a social engagement and business intelligence platform that enables businesses to gain insights about their customers and develop personalized experiences. Using enMarkit, online businesses can identify their influential referrers, their customers’ lifetime values and buying interests, and conduct targeted loyalty and marketing campaigns online. Within just two months of its transition from a B2C to a B2B model, enMarkit has an expected revenue run rate of $50,000.

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Pinterest’s Valuation Rises; Revenues Remain a Mystery

Twitter’s recent IPO has sparked  interest in IPOs of other social media sites. The next big one that the market is waiting for is online scrapbooking site,  Pinterest. Launched in 2010, Pinterest’s growth has seen phenomenal growth and is the third most popular website in the U.S. after Facebook and Twitter.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Salesforce is an international company with widespread adoption. But there are some markets that have not adopted Salesforce.com yet. What are some of your thoughts about those large emerging markets?

Alex Dayton: I think there’s what I would recommend to Salesforce and what I would recommend to an entrepreneur to do. My recommendation to an entrepreneur is stay laser focused. Focus is key. You need to know what your sweet spot market is. Is it companies under 100 users, under 2,000 users, above 1,000 users? And then pick a region and be the leader in one region before you go to five. >>>