One good idea after another

Before I wrote my monthly column, I had to make my anger known at the breakfast table. My lovely wife just said, "Give Christian Klein a chance, he's still young and has to sow his wild oats first." My answer: "Yes, of course I don't begrudge him his green playground - Greenfield and Rise - but please not at the expense of existing customers."

The Manager Magazin March thus also states: "The hard-working and likeable Mr. Klein has, as he says himself, done his homework on integration and increased customer satisfaction to record levels - plus ten points on the Net Promoter Score. But rock solid is not enough, anywhere and certainly not in the software world, which thrives on the imagination of tomorrow."Digital transformation, Asap, Run Simple, Conversion or Rise are necessary repair service behaviors for the Hana and S/4 stratgies that have hit the wall.

Attention, copy-and-paste follows: What will become of AnyDB licenses after 2025? How do you replace large Oracle and DB2 databases with the in-memory computing technology of the Hana platform? Probably no journalist or analyst is interested in this anymore, even our DSAG is very silent on this topic - but for us existing customers, the answer is vital: licensing-wise and organizationally.

More than a year ago, SAP Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller promised us a solution for AnyDB - nothing has happened! SAP remains silent about the AnyDB conversion, but continues to buy new companies. Now SAP's existing customers are to replace Aris wallpaper with colorful charts from Signavio.

What used to be called Business Process Reengineering is now called Business Process Mining/Intelligence. But Signavio is just another mislabeling: There have been excellent tools for 25 years to perform "process mining" in a sustainable way - otherwise the many thousands of existing SAP customers would not have survived.

However, HPI spin-off Signavio, which is affiliated with SAP and whose advisory board includes ex-SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, is considered a lower-ranking player in the process optimization business, writes Manager Magazin in its March issue. It generates little revenue and high losses. Munich-based competitor Celonis is the leader, but the category's pioneer blocked all purchase inquiries - including SAP's, Manager Magazin reports.

However, Celonis has been on SAP's PKL for many years, whether this can and will remain so, my friends in Walldorf could not or would not say. Accordingly, the Manager Magazin analyzes harshly: "With the Business Process Intelligence freemium offering, SAP wants to lure more customers into an S/4 subscription and thus further drive the shift to the cloud business model."

For me, Rise is also holistically a labeling fraud intended to distract from the real problems. After Christian Klein gave an exclusive interview to the American user association Asug, which shamelessly used it to recruit members, Asug praises SAP's Rise to the skies.

Ultimately, however, Rise is also just an IT tool like Asap, Run Simple or Conversion. Somehow, the release change has to succeed, and this is where the young SAP board members Christian Klein, Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig keep coming up with something new: one good idea after another, right?

I don't expect much from the beloved DSAG in the future: The new board has to find itself first and the DSAG annual congress has already been canceled again. My hopes rest on the ex-Microsoft executives: sustainable communication by the new Marketing Director Julia White. And innovation, vision and strategy by HR Director and COO Sabine Bendiek - or as Manager Magazin called her: an SAP firefighter!

Microsoft has done an excellent job of managing the cultural and technological change, so perhaps the two managers also see an opportunity at SAP to pull the cart out of the mud. Otherwise, our SAP could suffer a fate similar to that of IBM: Big enough to survive, but without any hope of success, because Hana and S/4 will not save the ERP world market leader.