Dead through no fault of his own

Autonomy also has a downside: SAP is successful, innovative and hardworking. But contact with the outside world has been lost in recent years. Strictly speaking: SAP has never paid attention to what the remaining IT nerds are doing. SAP has always gone its own way.

After 50 years of SAP, it is obvious that the path was and is successful, but also marked by many unnecessary and blameless crashes. SAP could have spared itself many of these failures and repairs if the ERP world market leader had listened and looked more consistently at the IT market. Naturally, one learns from damage, but a lot of repair service behavior and thus unnecessary costs could have been avoided.

While the entire IT world was already celebrating service-oriented architecture (SOA), SAP was still holding on ironclad to its own innovation ESA, Enterprise Service Architecture. Finally, but actually much too late, SAP's ESA was laid to rest at Sapphire 2006 in Paris and also replaced by SOA in Walldorf. Overnight, ESA was replaced by SOA in all presentation documents.

SAP has been guilty of very little over the past 50 years, but it has also looked very little beyond its own nose. SAP was enough for itself. SAP did things its own way. The prevailing motto was quick repair service. This mishmash gave rise to SAP's own life, which was no longer in sync with the outside world. Nothing was wrong or amiss within the SAP bubble, but from the outside, SAP appeared increasingly strange.

SAP could be dying in its own bubble through no fault of its own. This process is visible in the SAP share price and the statements of CEO Christian Klein and CFO Luka Mucic. Both executives are convinced that SAP is just as good and successful a cloud company as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and many others - but the share price is not at all developing as successfully as the other companies. Christian Klein and Luka Mucic make claims without seeing the whole picture. SAP communicates neither with its own community nor with the IT scene, and certainly not with civil society. Klein and Mucic seem to be content with their own realm of domination, but resources are gradually running out, which inevitably leads to death through no fault of their own.

SAP needs fresh air therapy. SAP needs a blood refreshment. SAP needs to abandon its fear of contact with its own community and the IT scene. Almost all IT companies currently have the better story in store. They convince their investors and shareholders with visions and narratives. Only SAP is calmly facing death through no fault of its own in its fiftieth year of existence. The equanimity of Christian Klein and Luka Mucic in the face of true events in the world is frightening.