Dec 10, 2025
•3 minute read
SAP Customer Data
What Is Customer Data?
Customer data is critical for companies to understand purchasing patterns for their e-commerce strategy as well as balancing supply and demand in their supply chain. Technology plays a significant role in gathering, analyzing, and delivering customer data insights that companies rely on for competitive advantage.
Customer Data in the B2B and B2C Landscape
Customer data can come in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) forms. In the digitized world where e-commerce continues to expand, the volume of data grows with it. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for companies. On the one hand, the level of insight data brings can lead to new product and service innovations. On the other hand, aggregating an immense set of datapoints and pulling value from it can be daunting without an investment in technology.
SAPinsider has a few examples of how companies are approaching those issues to glean the most value and insight from their customer data.
What Is Customer Data?
Customer data is critical for companies to understand purchasing patterns for their e-commerce strategy as well as balancing supply and demand in their supply chain. Technology plays a significant role in gathering, analyzing, and delivering customer data insights that companies rely on for competitive advantage.
Customer Data in the B2B and B2C Landscape
Customer data can come in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) forms. In the digitized world where e-commerce continues to expand, the volume of data grows with it. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage for companies. On the one hand, the level of insight data brings can lead to new product and service innovations. On the other hand, aggregating an immense set of datapoints and pulling value from it can be daunting without an investment in technology.
SAPinsider has a few examples of how companies are approaching those issues to glean the most value and insight from their customer data.
Retailer invests in consumer behavior. Retail is an ever-changing industry where customer mindsets shift and technologies evolve. In this article, Ramesh J. Chougule, AVP, SAP Cloud and Digital Lead at Infosys, describes a retailer that made significant investments in intelligent e-commerce technologies and a shopping services arm, transforming several internal processes. Strategic technology investments helped the company build a shopping service that enhanced the entire value chain. It connected consumers with a seamless experience, from ordering to doorstep delivery. The business experienced growth and became more profitable in a year, even as the pandemic affected its brick-and-mortar locations.
Personas and the shift to fashion retail. Customer preference and personalization means adapting to different consumer mindsets. Nuno Miller, CIO for Sonae Fashion, witnessed this firsthand as significant mindset shifts occurred during the transition from traditional retail to fashion retail. In this article, Miller says an agile operation and ability to innovate are absolute in fashion retail. Personas play a significant role in making that happen. Understanding your customer personas is critical if you’re to succeed as an agile operation capable of developing products to those specific audiences, says Miller.
Wholesaler implements e-commerce. Knowing the products that your customers want when they want them is critical for retail survival. In this article, the wholesaler implemented its e-commerce solution two years earlier than planned, leading to a holistic view of customer demand data. Joe Bruhin, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Breakthru Beverage, says, “We’re able to move fast and adapt to changing demand patterns because of our end-to-end SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions, as well as SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) for our ERP, which has helped us tremendously in meeting customer demand.”
Vendors in the SAP customer data space include: AllSight, Westernacher Consulting, Tacit Knowledge, Datasense Solutions, and McKinsol Consulting Inc.
How BMW KSA Uses SAP CDP for AI-Driven PersonalizationMohamed Yousuf Naghi Motors has successfully implemented SAP solutions to unify its customer data, enabling real-time engagement and targeted marketing strategies that reduced ad spend by 50% while improving conversion rates.
Nov 24, 2025
•2 minute read
SAP’s Sale of Qualtrics Stake Signals Strategy ShiftSAP announced on March 13 that it reached an agreement to sell its controlling stake of Qualtrics International Inc. to a consortium headlined by private equity investors Silver Lake and pension fund Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
After a negotiation process of more than six weeks, Silver Lake will acquire Qualtrics at a purchase price of $18.15 per share. The all-cash deal values SAP’s stake at $7.7 billion and gives Qualtrics an equity value of $12.5 billion. Silver Lake signaled its intention to transition Qualtrics into an independent privately held company. “Silver Lake has both the operational expertise and the track record with software companies to help Qualtrics extend its leadership in the XM category it pioneered,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein.
In this article, you will learn about some of the reasons behind SAP's initial acquisition of Qualtrics, why it opted to sell the company so soon, and how the sale will affect SAP as a whole, as well as its users.
Mar 13, 2023
•2 minute read
Building Customer Intelligence CapabilitiesA key area that SAPinsiders highlight as one of the top business challenges: evolving customer expectations and demand. This has emerged as a top business driver in many of our research reports, including the most recent report, SAPinsider Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA. To meet the rapidly evolving customer expectation and demands, organizations need to […]
Jun 29, 2022
•3 minute read
Re-Imagining the Sales ApproachDuring the COVID-19 pandemic that forced many companies to re-imagine how they did business, Dallas-based GDT, a provider of IT infrastructure — upon which applications serve healthcare, retail, state government, and other industries — redesigned its sales approach to accommodate customer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) needs. This changed GDT’s billing model to a subscription-based model where it bills customers on a periodic basis, rather than just once a year, increasing customer touchpoints and requiring a reworking of the sales team. GDT’s Director of Corporate Applications sat down with SAPinsider to share his experience with how GDT enabled this transformation with the help of SAP and other tech partners.
In this article, learn:
• How GTD implemented two strategies to unlock growth during the pandemic;
• How the company created changes in the sales and billing cycles of its business model by moving to SAP and cloud products;
• How GDT achieved consistent customer data across its SAP solutions;
• What led to GDT re-architecting its SaaS solution into one that is sustainable and scaleable.
Aug 5, 2021
•5 minute read
360° Consumer View – Improve your margins by monetizing buying patterns from the data you already ownMany organizations have an overabundance of data about their consumers as a result of campaigns, coupons, mailing lists, and other third-party data sources. But it can be extremely challenging to turn that data into actionable insights. Even worse—managing mountains of disconnected data requires time spent by already constrained resources and can diminish your ability to create value. By offloading the aggregation of data from various consumer touchpoints to a modern cloud platform, however, you can achieve an all-inclusive view of your consumer behavior. Then, by leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms, you can more efficiently analyze the data and provide meaningful insights that go beyond traditional data, such as point-of-sale transactions, including IoT, 5G, social media, and market intelligence data.
In this webinar you will learn:
Recommendations for how to improve market share, penetration, and product margins;
- How to save time and money spent on promotions and manual data collection and aggregation;
- Ways to leverage push notifications and variance narratives to attain instant awareness of store and product profitability; and
- Opportunities to implement edge innovation to get the most value from the data you already own.
Feb 1, 2021
•1 minute read
Secrets to Successful Data ConversionsConverting data from a legacy system to an SAP system can be a daunting task. Follow experienced advice for planning and executing your data conversion strategy, from developing project scope to testing and monitoring the data conversion. Included with these tips are two downloads: a sample Microsoft Visio data dependency planning chart and a conversion […]
Jul 16, 2010
•23 minute read
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