SAP Qualtrics has discovered huge demand for a free new solution designed to help businesses monitor how WFH employees are feeling and offer them real-time support in these high-stress times.
Eight days ago during an appearance on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, SAP co-CEO Jennifer Morgan said that more than 5,000 companies were already using the solution, the brainchild of Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith.
In the subsequent 8 days, that number has jumped to more than 7,600 companies and organizations using ‘Remote Work Pulse.’ And more than 14,000 projects are underway.
The creation and widespread use of the new sentiment-measuring tool underscore SAP’s intentions to help its customers during the COVID-19 crisis. They also illustrate how SAP is using Qualtrics to transcend SAP’s industrial back-office roots.
Jen Morgan on new Remote Work Pulse tool
“Our world went virtual overnight, and companies are struggling to make sure their employees are okay, that they’re safe, that they’re healthy, and that they have the tools that they need to be productive,” said Morgan, who took over with Christian Klein as SAP’s co-CEOs just a few months before the COVID-19 crisis hit.
“But that doesn’t end the first week that they’re home. We all know that every week, things are changing really, really fast. And Qualtrics, which as you know is a great company that came into the SAP family last year, is focused on sentiment,” Morgan told Cramer.
“So one of the first things we did was launch something called Remote Work Pulse,” she continued. “We got over 5,000 companies to jump on board, using this for free and it’s a way to really listen to what’s going on with your employees because this is really changing every single day. It goes from issues about connectivity, to how do I work with other people from home with my kids at home and learning at home.”
It’s an intriguing product in many ways. First, it offers real-time support for employees at a time when mental health and well-being is paramount. At the same time, it also gives the marketplace a strikingly different view of what SAP and Qualtrics can deliver here in 2020.
“Mental health is something that has to be on the minds of companies today because making sure your employees are healthy and that they have what they need is going to be critical to anything before they can be productive,” Morgan said.
“Qualtrics is key and we hope that many other companies will take advantage of this offer.”
SAP Concur and Ariba tools are helping customers adjust
Morgan also highlighted a feature in SAP’s Concur expense-management tool called “Locate” that helped companies find and give assistance to traveling employees as the coronavirus crisis rapidly escalated and travel restrictions were put in place.
“A lot of companies, when all these travel mandates went in place, were able to very quickly locate their employees and make sure they got home safely,” Morgan told Cramer, noting that as an example of how applications are becoming much more intelligent and valuable.
“Concur also manages and helps employees with their spend. And when you look at some the trends we’re seeing with spend, they’re what you would expect—work is still happening, people are still spending, employees are still expensing, but it looks a little bit different. In China, we see that picking up a little bit more based on what we were seeing with customers that are using Concur based on what they were spending back in January.”
Another example cited by Morgan of increasingly intelligent applications is Ariba, which SAP positions as a business and commerce network made up of 4.5 million buyers and suppliers transacting about $3 billion in commerce within Ariba.
“At a time like this, as I talk to other CEOs the #1 thing they’re focused on is new networks of supply,” Morgan told Cramer.
“Last week, we opened that up to the world to use Ariba Discovery for free so we can bring together the demand and the supply. We had a construction company that was trying to repurpose a building to become a hospital and needed beds but couldn’t find them. We connected them with another supplier and within 30 minutes they were able to get the 500 beds they needed.”
The response to SAP making Ariba Discovery available to the world at no charge for several months has been quite powerful, as we discussed in a recent piece called SAP: Big Spike in Use of Sourcing App Offered Free During COVID-19.
“Now is the time for us to just be there for our customers.”
It’s the latest step in the rapid evolution of SAP, from a company with massive equity in the world of traditional business and traditional on-premises software to one that can compete—and is eager to do so—in the fast-paced world of digital business and the cloud.
“We’ve got a great portfolio, and we’re just getting started with new combinations in that portfolio,” Morgan told Cramer.
“And really now is the time for us to just be there for our customers—no strings attached—and make sure we bring the best of SAP to them because this is what we do: we connect demand and supply, we bring in the sentiment, and we help companies run really effectively.”
Yesterday, I shared a number of insights from Morgan’s counterpart, co-CEO Christian Klein, in SAP Has Twice as Many Cloud ERP Customers as Oracle: Exclusive Co-CEO Interview.
Klein’s overview of how the world of ERP is evolving at an extremely rapid pace, combined with Morgan’s examples of how SAP is quickly rolling out not just new products but new go-to-market strategies, present a compelling perspective for one of the world’s oldest and most-successful software companies.
Morgan, telling Cramer that “This is how we roll,” summed it up nicely.
“This is what we’re doing and this is how a company like ours, which is blessed to have a great business, can bring that to the world in new ways.”
