Work-life balance

My wife noticed:

"You've been home a lot lately. Are you preparing for semi-retirement and early retirement, as apparently some of your SAP colleagues are now doing, perhaps not entirely voluntarily?"

No, because I'm actually planning to do this CIO job for a few more years, which I still really enjoy. To make sure I last for many more years, I've resolved to pay more attention to my work-life balance. It's a question of responsibility to myself, to my wife and also to my company and its employees.

My friend Gerd Oswald has, with a lot of luck, survived several serious health attacks and is now sitting full of beans on the SAP Supervisory Board. I don't want to let it get that far and so I'm at the fitness club at least three times a week.

SAP is currently trying to strike a completely different balance - or to put it better: I'm not sure whether SAP is aware of the responsibility of oscillating between a software manufacturer for on-premise applications and a cloud provider for enterprise applications. Of course: life is change. But SAP was an ERP SW vendor for forty years in an almost perfect ecosystem.

The responsibilities were optimally divided: SAP produced ERP applications and the necessary middleware; IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and others supplied the matching databases; numerous hardware manufacturers created the infrastructure; and SAP partners took care of the customizing.

For many years, there was a harmonious balance between SAP, the IT companies and consulting firms. The SAP community was in an almost optimal work-life balance.

Sybase, Hana and cloud computing changed everything! Instead of continuing to optimize the successful path, SAP recklessly questioned the ERP unique selling proposition and became involved in topics where other companies already had a blatant lead.

With Sybase, SAP entered the database business and overnight had to argue quite differently to IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. With Hana, SAP established a monopolistic system in the community: In the future, the ERP infrastructure will consist exclusively of Linux and the Hana database platform.

This also reduced the hardware to Xeon and Power servers. In addition, the ERP world market leader decided to also become a cloud provider. Further development and adaptation of the company's own and purchased applications in the direction of the cloud would have been logical - becoming a competitor to the hyperscalers would not make sense from a business point of view.

Not only did the work-life balance in the SAP community get out of hand as a result of Sybase, Hana and Cloud, I also have to ask myself the question today: Is SAP aware of the responsibility that the ERP group is shouldering here?

After all, it makes a big difference whether I am an ERP software manufacturer or a database inventor, trading platform (Ariba), software operator (cloud computing) or consultant (trusted advisor). Manufacturer or operator? SAP obviously doesn't strike a balance here.

SAP LaMa is now running completely out of control. Three emergency patches within four months for the Hana database platform are intolerable.

A cloud offering that is not scalable in all directions (breathing system) runs counter to the idea of "cloud computing". We are not the only IT departments saying goodbye to the HEC and relying on on-premise; the Hana Enterprise cloud exit is also being discussed at my SAP regulars' table.

SAP is in no way aware of its new role as an intended "hyperscaler". SAP CEO Bill McDermott wants more revenue as a salesman, but without more responsibility.

This balance cannot be achieved. If SAP wants to have long-term and sustainable success with cloud computing, the cultural change from SW manufacturer to SW operator must succeed and a new work-life balance must emerge in the SAP community.