It's Déjà vu all over again

With S/4, SAP has created the next ERP generation after ERP/ECC 6.0, but not Software as a Service (SaaS). The comment is the perfect analysis of the past years: Abap, Java, NetWeaver and SolMan are excellent tools to build the best ERP system in the world. The NW Abap stack can be used to develop complex business processes, but it makes the SAP core of R/3 and ERP/ECC 6.0 completely unsuitable for cloud computing. 

The attempt to develop a new ERP for the cloud has failed with SAP Business ByDesign because there is no tradition for SaaS at SAP. Business ByDesign still exists, but no one wants to talk about it. S/4 might have had a chance in the cloud if SAP had entered into real partnerships with the hyperscalers and had been willing to learn from them as well. 

The contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Alibaba are more political in nature with a strong marketing impact. SAP did not want to learn from the mistakes to bring forth Embrace 2.0, instead there was Rise with SAP. Rise is an attempt to become successful in the cloud without the help of partners - one face to the customer, as SAP CEO Christian Klein said at the Rise presentation.

Sharing in partnership has never been an issue at SAP! Déjà vu: There was once a company called SAP Hosting, but instead of developing it into a cloud provider, the company was sold to Deutsche Telekom - so the knowledge about outsourcing, hosting and cloud was lost.

The current attempts to become a private, public or hybrid cloud company are doomed to failure because S/4 is not cloud software. No acquisitions will help here either, because the ERP core was built for on-premise.