What Is SAP CX? The Five Core Solutions and How They Connect

SAP CX (SAP Customer Experience) is SAP’s portfolio of cloud products for everything that touches a customer: selling, serving, ordering online, marketing and managing customer data. It is not one system. It is five core products, each with its own data model and release cycle, that share customer data through SAP’s integration layer and, ideally, one ERP underneath.

This post is our reference answer to the question we hear in almost every first meeting: what is actually in SAP CX, which part do we need, and how does it fit together? It replaces four older overview posts, so it also covers how SAP got here.

TL;DR: SAP CX consists of five core products: Sales Cloud V2 (pipeline and forecasting), Service Cloud V2 (cases and SLAs), Commerce Cloud (B2B and B2C storefronts), Engagement Cloud (marketing automation, formerly SAP Emarsys) and the Customer Data Platform (unified profiles and consent). Each works on its own. The value comes from connecting them to each other and to the ERP, which is why we deliver the CX stack and SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud with one team.

How did SAP get from SAP CRM to SAP CX?

The name has changed often enough to confuse even SAP partners, so a short history helps.

• SAP CRM (from around 2000): on-premise, running on NetWeaver, customised in ABAP and tightly linked to SAP ERP. Strong for complex B2B processes, slow to upgrade.
• SAP Cloud for Customer, C4C (from around 2013): SAP’s first SaaS CRM, combining Cloud for Sales and Cloud for Service with automatic updates and mobile apps. Today this is what people call “V1”.
• SAP C/4HANA (2018): a brand that grouped C4C with the acquisitions SAP had made for commerce (Hybris), customer identity (Gigya), quoting (CallidusCloud) and marketing (Emarsys). It was a portfolio more than a platform: different architectures, different data models, lots of integration work between them.
• SAP CX with V2 (from 2020 onwards): SAP dropped the C/4HANA label and rebuilt sales and service as Sales Cloud V2 and Service Cloud V2, new products with a new data model, extensions built side by side on SAP BTP, and REST and event-based integration.

What this means today: C4C still receives releases, but SAP’s innovation, including new AI such as Joule agents, targets V2. As of September 2026 SAP has not announced an end-of-maintenance date for V1. New projects start on V2, and existing C4C customers should plan the move on their own schedule. Our C4C to V2 migration strategy covers how to sequence it.

What does SAP Sales Cloud V2 do?

SAP Sales Cloud V2 is where sales teams manage leads, opportunities, accounts and forecasts. It is also where most of our CX projects start, because better pipeline visibility is the benefit a management team notices first.

Who uses it: sales reps, key account managers, sales managers, sales operations.

What is inside:

• Pipeline management: leads and opportunities through configurable stages, with mandatory fields, notifications and approvals per stage.
• Forecasting: weighted pipeline, category-based forecasts and AI-assisted signals that flag deals where activity has stalled.
• Account and territory management: account hierarchies, territory models by region, industry or named account, and an account view with every interaction.
• Activities and Joule: calls, meetings, emails and tasks linked to accounts and deals; Joule summarises accounts, drafts follow-ups and suggests next steps.
• Analytics: embedded dashboards for win rates, activity and forecast accuracy, configurable without development.

V2 is strong and still maturing. We describe the gaps openly in our assessment of Sales Cloud V2’s limitations, together with how we close them in projects. Product documentation is on SAP Help.

What does SAP Service Cloud V2 do?

SAP Service Cloud V2 handles everything after the sale: cases, service level agreements and the communication around them.

Who uses it: service agents, support managers, customer success teams, field service coordinators.

What is inside:

• Case management: create, categorise, route, escalate and close cases, with custom case types and SLA timers.
• Multi-channel inbox: email, phone, chat and portal requests in one agent view.
• Knowledge base: articles for agents and for customers, suggested automatically by case category.
• Self-service portal: customers open tickets, check status and find answers without calling.
• Routing: cases assigned by skill, workload, customer tier or category.

Because it shares the account model with Sales Cloud V2, agents see open deals and account status, and account managers see open cases before a renewal call. Cases that need a technician on site hand over to SAP Field Service Management. See SAP Help for the product documentation.

What does SAP Commerce Cloud do?

SAP Commerce Cloud runs digital storefronts, B2B and B2C, from one platform. SAP has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce for eleven consecutive years (SAP News, 2025).

Who uses it: e-commerce managers, merchandisers, catalogue managers, B2B sales operations.

What is inside:

• Product content and catalogues: variants, bundles, configurable products, customer-specific catalogues, many languages and currencies.
• Pricing and promotions: contract prices, volume tiers and promotions, ideally drawn from the ERP.
• Order management: from cart to fulfilment and returns, with split orders and availability checks against the ERP.
• B2B functions: buying organisations, buyer roles, approval workflows, requisition lists and quick order by part number.
• Composable Storefront: the Angular-based decoupled frontend (formerly called Spartacus) that replaces the older Accelerator templates. See SAP Help.

The B2B depth is why industrial companies choose it. For Franke we brought a stalled Commerce Cloud platform live in 90 days; the project received the SAP Quality Award for “Rapid Time to Value” (Franke story).

One date matters for existing customers: mainstream maintenance for the on-premise edition of SAP Commerce (last release 2205) ended on 31 July 2026 (SAP Help). Only customer-specific maintenance is available now. What to do after the end of on-premise support explains the options.

What does SAP Engagement Cloud (formerly SAP Emarsys) do?

On 19 February 2026 SAP renamed SAP Emarsys to SAP Engagement Cloud (SAP News). The existing product continues as the Emarsys edition; a new enterprise edition adds governance, administration and data controls for organisations with many brands, regions and teams. Existing Emarsys capabilities remain available. Our post on the rename covers what changes for customers.

SAP Engagement Cloud is a full omnichannel engagement platform, not just an email tool.

Who uses it: marketing teams, CRM and campaign managers, growth teams.

What is inside:

• Omnichannel campaigns: email, SMS, push, web personalisation and paid social audiences from one platform.
• Segmentation and prediction: segments by behaviour and lifecycle stage, with predicted purchase likelihood, churn risk and customer value.
• Automation: triggered journeys such as welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, renewal and win-back.
• Revenue attribution: campaign results tied to actual orders.

A separate point that is easy to miss: SAP Marketing Cloud is a different, older product, and its support ends in December 2026, less than three months from now. SAP names Engagement Cloud as the successor. If you still run Marketing Cloud, the migration should already be under way.

What does the SAP Customer Data Platform do?

The SAP Customer Data Platform (CDP) merges customer data from CRM, commerce, marketing, service and external sources into one profile per customer.

Who uses it: data teams, marketing operations, CX architects, data protection officers.

What is inside:

• Identity resolution: matching records across systems, deterministically and probabilistically.
• Unified profiles: behaviour, transactions and service history in one view.
• Consent management: GDPR and Swiss nFADP (nDSG) consent recorded once and respected in every channel.
• Audience activation: segments pushed to Engagement Cloud, Commerce Cloud or ad platforms.

CDP is the least visible of the five and the one that makes the others consistent. Whether you need it depends on how many channels and data sources you have; when you really need SAP CDP goes through the criteria.

What sits around the five core products?

SAP CX also includes specialised products that we often implement alongside the core:

• Customer Identity (CIAM): registration, login and consent for customer portals and shops.
• SAP CPQ: configuration, pricing and quotes for complex products.
• SAP Field Service Management: planning and dispatching technicians, mobile work orders.
• Loyalty: points, tiers and rewards programmes.

Underneath all of them sits SAP BTP for integration and extensions, and increasingly SAP Business AI. SAP reported that Business AI was included in two thirds of its cloud order entry in Q4 2025 (SAP News, January 2026), so AI features now arrive through the same products rather than as a separate purchase decision.

How do the SAP CX products connect?

There are two connection layers, and it helps to keep them apart.

SAP Integration Suite moves business objects between the CX products and the ERP. SAP Integration Suite ships prebuilt integration content for common SAP-to-SAP scenarios; the rest is mapped per project. Typical flows:

• Commerce to Sales: a B2B customer orders online and the account manager sees the order in Sales Cloud V2.
• Sales to Commerce: a negotiated price list for a key account appears in that customer’s storefront.
• Service to Sales: a critical case is flagged on the account before the renewal conversation.
• Commerce to Service: the agent sees what was ordered, when it shipped and where it is.

The Customer Data Platform merges the customer profile across channels, so marketing does not send a promotion to a customer with an open complaint. How customer data, campaigns and sales follow-up add up to one plan is the subject of our go-to-market strategy with SAP CX.

Extensions follow SAP’s clean core principle: the standard product stays untouched, and custom logic runs next to it on SAP BTP, usually built with the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model and connected through APIs and events. Upgrades then stop breaking custom code, because the custom code only depends on published APIs. The available APIs are documented on the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

A practical rule from our projects: treat integration as its own workstream with its own architect, not as a task inside each product project. When the Commerce team and the Sales team plan separately, the gaps show up late, when they are expensive.

Why does the ERP decide most SAP CX projects?

CX projects rarely fail inside the CRM. They fail at the seam to the ERP: the order that will not post, the price the quote cannot resolve, the case with no material or installed base behind it. Prices, availability, customers and orders live in the ERP, and every CX product is only as good as its connection to them.

This is why Spadoom works as a Swiss SAP Gold Partner for Cloud ERP and Customer Experience with one team: the same people design the SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud core and the CX processes that depend on it. What that looks like in practice is described in S/4HANA Public Cloud and Sales Cloud V2 as one integrated stack, and why it matters when choosing a partner in the best SAP partner for Cloud ERP and CRM in Switzerland.

SAP CX also works with non-SAP ERPs through APIs. It is simply more integration work, because the prebuilt SAP-to-SAP content does not apply and every mapping has to be built and maintained.

Which SAP CX product should you start with?

Start where the pain is, and add products as the foundation matures.

Most pressing need	Start with	Why
Pipeline visibility and forecasting	Sales Cloud V2	Fastest benefit for management, builds the account master others reuse
Support quality and SLAs	Service Cloud V2	Shares the account model with Sales Cloud V2
Digital ordering, B2B or B2C	Commerce Cloud	Self-service ordering with ERP prices and availability
Campaigns and personalisation	Engagement Cloud	Omnichannel automation; urgent if you still run SAP Marketing Cloud
Fragmented customer data, consent	Customer Data Platform	One profile and one consent record before scaling marketing
ERP renewal at the same time	S/4HANA Public Cloud with Sales Cloud V2	One data model from the start instead of an interface later

If you are unsure where your organisation stands, our SAP CX consulting overview for Switzerland and the transformation planner are good starting points, or simply talk to us.

FAQ

What is SAP CX?

SAP CX (SAP Customer Experience) is SAP’s portfolio of cloud products for the customer-facing side of a business. The five core products are SAP Sales Cloud V2, SAP Service Cloud V2, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Engagement Cloud (formerly SAP Emarsys) and the SAP Customer Data Platform. Around them sit specialised products for identity (CIAM), quoting (CPQ), field service (FSM) and loyalty.

Do I need all five SAP CX products?

No. Each product can be licensed and run on its own, and most companies start with one, usually Sales Cloud V2 or Commerce Cloud. The value grows when the products share customer data, so plan the integration from the start even if you roll the products out one after another.

Can I use SAP CX without SAP ERP?

Yes. All SAP CX products expose REST and OData APIs and can connect to non-SAP ERPs through SAP Integration Suite or other middleware. With SAP S/4HANA the integration is shorter, because SAP ships prebuilt integration content for business partners, pricing and orders. With another ERP you build and maintain those mappings yourself.

Is SAP Emarsys the same as SAP Marketing Cloud?

No. SAP Emarsys was renamed SAP Engagement Cloud on 19 February 2026 and is SAP’s marketing automation product going forward. SAP Marketing Cloud is a separate, older product whose support ends in December 2026; SAP names Engagement Cloud as its successor, so Marketing Cloud customers should be migrating now.

Is SAP Sales Cloud V1 (C4C) still supported?

Yes. SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C, often called V1) still receives releases, but SAP’s innovation now goes into Sales Cloud V2 and Service Cloud V2. As of September 2026, SAP has not announced an end-of-maintenance date for V1. V2 is a new product with its own data model, so moving there is a migration project, not an upgrade.

How do the SAP CX products share data?

Through two layers. SAP Integration Suite moves business objects between the products and the ERP (an order from Commerce Cloud appears in Sales Cloud V2, a price list flows the other way). The Customer Data Platform merges customer profiles and consent from all channels into one view that marketing, sales and service can use.