The SAP/MS disaster

Although the halcyon days are naturally long gone when SAP helped a desperate Microsoft to get the SQL server ready for R/3. Today there is only Hana for SAP - everything else is old economy!

The new partnership, on the other hand, is noteworthy because it is based on two embarrassing construction sites: Once again, there is to be an integration of MS Office into SAP's products and Microsoft's Cloud Azure is to become Hana-compatible.

The former is the best joke from Sapphire 2016 in Orlando. Every existing SAP customer in attendance will remember Duet, the interface between ERP 6.0 and Office, of which former SAP Chief Technology Officer Shai Agassi wanted to sell at least one million licenses.

The principle at the time: when someone enters their vacation in Office Outlook, a message is sent to the HR department via the Duet interface. It was déjà vu all over again; SAP CEO Bill McDermott presented exactly the same function this year as a groundbreaking innovation.

And together with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, McDermott announced another incredible sensation: Azure, the Microsoft Cloud, can now also do Hana - something that AWS has been able to do for over a year.

In Orlando at Sapphire 2016, two IT company leaders met who had no qualms about selling their own existing customers old wine in new bottles. A revived Duet and the Azure cloud, now finally with official Hana certification, are a disaster.