SAP Press Release

This press review is my subjective selection and attempts to reflect a general mood that extends beyond the SAP community. It has no claim to completeness, even though this would probably be easy to achieve with Google.

The year got off to a perfect start for SAP CEO Bill McDermott. In the 1/2019 issue on page 38, a jury from Manager Magazin voted him "Manager of the Year 2018.

McDermott greeted MM colleagues for the interview with the words "This is my best Christmas present" - perhaps his wife and children didn't give him anything for Christmas last year?

In any case, E-3 Magazine joins the numerous congratulations and wishes the SAP CEO that he survives this year as well.

Bill McDermott himself has pretended to measure his actions and skills against the SAP share price. The share price is currently hovering around 100 euros, well off last year's high (108 euros) and even further from the notional amount he promised shareholders at last year's Annual General Meeting.

The MM interview states that McDermott wants to increase SAP's market value to 300 billion euros (currently about 120 billion).

After the MM award, it was all downhill! The Wirtschaftswoche made a start in the 11/2019 issue with the cover title: SAP - User's Nightmare.

Colleague Michael Kroker writes logically in the introduction:

"SAP is the global market leader for enterprise software. The promise: the optimization of business processes. But for many companies, implementing an SAP system is a nightmare. Many projects take longer than planned, become significantly more expensive - or even fail altogether. There's another way."

Programmed chaos, says Michael Kroker:

"An SAP implementation overwhelms many companies."

But even "successful" projects are now running into difficulties. Numerous experts from the SAP community believe that even a successful transformation to Hana, S/4, BW/4 and C/4 is so complex and expensive that even the reintroduction of an alternative ERP system should be evaluated.

Up to now, SAP release changes were always annoying, but bearable. Deleting the entire SAP ERP and starting over with a different system was never an option. Times have changed.

The highlight of SAP's coverage was an interview by colleague Bernd Freytag in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) following the departures of CTO and President SAP Cloud Platform Björn Goerke (end of 2018), Service Board Member Bernd Leukert (February 2019) and Cloud Business Board Member Rob Enslin (April 2019).

Now McDermott claimed:

"SAP is stronger than ever before. [...] There is no question of uncertainty."

Which led colleague Freytag to the spontaneous question:

"Don't make Fake News out of dropping out?"