SAP today announced it is renaming its SAP Emarsys solution to SAP Engagement Cloud. The rebrand is part of a larger SAP strategy to make engagement a core enterprise capability across the company’s portfolio.
But it’s not just a name change, Joanna Milliken, head of SAP Engagement Cloud, told MarTech.
“With Engagement Cloud, we really wanted to… expand engagement beyond marketing only and beyond that traditional campaign, if you will, into true enterprise orchestration,” Milliken said. “So that marketers can finally deliver on that promise of personalizing everywhere and being relevant, wherever that interaction happens, whether it’s the end customer or consumer, or partners, resellers or employees.”
SAP Engagement Cloud is part of SAP’s backbone, which means more information is now available to marketers. Instead of relying on inventory data, for example, there’s now visibility into customer data and the supply chain. Engagement Cloud’s governance, compliance and enterprise scale all come from SAP.
In SAP Engagement Cloud, access to operational data is much more native and much faster. Users will rely less on passing data back and forth and hunting for the right person or system with access to the data they need.
In the past, Milliken said, the effort required to build something as routine as an abandoned shopping cart email was “heroic.” Not anymore.
“We just saw a much bigger opportunity than everything being marketing-owned or siloed,” she said.
Is ‘engagement architect’ a role we’ll see in the future?
Milliken said her conversations with customers are less and less about explaining why using data is essential. Instead, they focus on how they can use data for personalization. In big enterprises,she said, customers are trying to get their arms around their data to go beyond traditional campaigns.
In fact, Milliken said she sees some marketing roles potentially evolving into the role of “engagement architect.”
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That role would still execute engagements and interactions, but it can start looking at guardrails, rules and operating conditions, and focus less on journey and campaign builders.
“When we have agents that ride along with us, as marketers, we get to automate the jobs to be done,” Milliken said. That means steps like segmentation are handled by agents and assistants that create dynamic user flows.
SAP Engagement Cloud, enterprise edition, is available today. It includes advanced enterprise administration and architectural features and provides users with a flexible solution to accommodate, for example, a company that changes its business model from B2B to DTC.
The existing capabilities of the SAP Emarsys solution remain available within SAP EngagementCloud. Customers can adopt new capabilities incrementally, based on their priorities and readiness.
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