Please help SAP!

SAP - the better cloud company?

SAP is probably the most valuable IT group in the world - but hardly anyone knows that, and neither does SAP itself. The pointless discussion about cloud computing has severely weakened the ERP world market leader in recent years. Instead of focusing on its unique and still undisputed core competency, SAP obviously wants to prove pointlessly that it is the better cloud company.

It is a drama comparable to if now the successful and renowned car manufacturers would believe of themselves to be the better traffic planners or diesel and gasoline producers.

I am not aware of any case where a car manufacturer operates a refinery because diesel or gasoline is ultimately needed for the car engine - and whether the bet will be made if car manufacturers now set up their own battery plants on greenfield sites has not yet been decided either.

Cobbler, stick to your last: Successful car manufacturers don't run construction companies to build highways all over the country or develop suitable garage buildings in cities.

Likewise, SAP should keep its hands off hosting, hardware, databases and cloud computing. But SAP could not resist the temptations and was ultimately overtaken in the core competence CRM by competitor Salesforce in terms of revenue and stock market value this summer.

If SAP is not perfect in cloud computing because Microsoft, Google, Alibaba or Amazon have more years of experience and the better scaling effects, then no one will punish SAP for that. The laggards always have it a little harder. If SAP is not perfect in the area of databases because its own in-memory database is still young, then no one will punish SAP for that. IBM and Oracle are old hands.

If SAP doesn't have a perfect CRM system and its own existing customers are migrating in large numbers to its competitor Salesforce, then alarm bells should be ringing throughout Walldorf. CRM is as much a part of ERP as SCM, HCM, finance, and controlling. If SAP fails in its core competencies and loses revenue, profit, and market value to Salesforce, then the management board and supervisory board must ask themselves whether there are fundamental problems here beyond exchange rate fluctuations, war, pandemics, and home offices.

One of the co-inventors of CRM has lost out to a newcomer from the cloud. Salesforce has overtaken the ERP world market leader SAP with its CRM product idea. How could this development occur? Does Salesforce have the better programmers? Does Salesforce have a better sales concept? Does Salesforce have better management? I think all these questions can be answered in the negative. SAP's fundamental problem is its product-oriented approach - which is why the SAP community must now help the ERP world market leader.

In many business sectors, it is no longer about functionality, quality and price, but about communication. Over the past twenty years, there has been a transition from functionality to meaning. Very many years ago, Audi advertised its cars with the functionality of the Quattro. The four-wheel drive was a unique selling point that hardly anyone needed, but the function triggered desire.

For many years, the point of an Audi in Salzburg has been to bring visitors safely and comfortably to the Salzburg Festival. Audi has changed its entire brand message: away from Quattro to culture. It is not technology that is the competitive edge, but what is made possible with this technology that is the decisive unique selling point.

Marketing calls the neat ride in an Audi e-tron to the Felsenreitschule at the Salzburg Festival to see the sensational performance of "Káťa Kabanová" by Leoš Janáček (1854 to 1928) with the stunning Corinne Winters as Katěrina (Káťa) storytelling, pure and simple.

SAP CEO Christian Klein and his colleagues on the Executive Board have not mastered this storytelling. Christian Klein still recites to his existing customers the functionality, quality and interoperability of a BTP, Hana and S/4. What the users are supposed to do with this technology is up to them.

Christian Klein refuses to do it, and probably can't: storytelling. So SAP has been overtaken by Salesforce because the CRM provider has the right stories. Ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott is also an excellent storyteller. With ServiceNow, McDermott will soon overtake SAP, too. We should all help SAP tell good stories, because there are more than enough of them in the SAP community. SAP is probably the most valuable IT company in the world.