Welcome to Episode 56 of the Cloud Wars Horizon Minute — featuring news and commentary hosted by Acceleration Economy analyst Tom Smith. Each episode provides insights into one or more Innovation Accelerators on the Cloud Wars Horizon. This episode focuses on Sana Commerce and its integrated commerce-ERP engine.
Highlights
01:00 — Tom caught up with their Global COO and Americas president/CEO Tim Beyer recently to get a feel for what they’ll be emphasizing at Community Summit.
01:10 — First, a little background for anyone who doesn’t yet know Sana. They’re not a new company; they have 550 employees and over $40 million in revenue. They’ve made their name in the e-commerce space by offering the tightest possible integration with Microsoft Dynamics and SAP ERP Systems. They have a particularly strong presence with manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers.
01:40 — Their deep ERP integration means that data flows smoothly, and in real time, between e-commerce and ERP systems. That means it’s not out of sync —pricing, availability, and other product details are always up to date.
02:00 — This year the company has made a big push around, and customers are embracing its cloud-based software, SANA Commerce Cloud, which updates every two weeks as a cloud app. It also bundles clickstream data with data pulled from the customer’s ERP system to give a complete performance view from a single analytics interface. That’s a major differentiator.
02:10 — The company will also be promoting its internally developed payment engine that it built because of the lack of online payments overall — Beyer shared with me that a surprising percentage of transactions made online still involve bank transfers to pay for orders, instead of using online payment functionality. SANA aims to change that mix.
02:20 — The company’s software is hosted in Azure cloud; Beyer said about 75 percent of its customer base is on the Dynamics platform, while 25 percent is on SAP.
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