A hot summer

It was the second best summer barbecue at our backyard by official attendance count.

Only in 2008 on the occasion of the regency of Léo pharmacist and the 22 percent care fee letter, even more colleagues accepted my invitation to barbecue and discuss.

This year, two-thirds of colleagues came to debate what was already expected, and one-third were completely surprised.

Already at the unofficial parallel event in the SAP-At the eighth summer party in Auenstein near Heilbronn-Ilsfeld, the departure of Snabe was discussed and predicted.

A little later, the time had come. Thus has Hasso Plattner to the high summer temperatures here in Germany added a little heat, because the unnecessary fluctuation in the SAP-management bodies is a cause for concern: Shai Agassi, John Schwarz, John Chen, Angelika Dammann, Lars Dalgaard, Luisa Delgado and now Jim Snabe.

Advancement to the Supervisory Board

So this summer was very hot in terms of content and temperature, and a cooling-off period would only do everyone involved good: Why does Snabe have to go straight from the CEO-Chair to a supervisory board chair?

There is another way, as ex-Lufthansa-CEO Wolfgang Mayrhuber. He had stepped down in 2010 after seven years on the Board of Management and in May of this year, after lengthy preparation, was appointed to the Supervisory Board moved in.

Second example: Linde CEO Wolfgang Reitzle, who is leaving the company next year, had publicly decided against mobilizing a quarter of the voting rights in order to be directly involved in the Supervisory Board to be able to move in.

Hasso Plattner on the other hand, boasted that it would be easy for him to rally 25 percent of the shareholder votes behind him and thus put Snabe directly into the Supervisory Board to promote.

That's when we agreed at my CIO barbecue that this could only be embarrassing for everyone involved and damaging to the community. Some of my colleagues even want to try, Dietmar Hopp to use it to force the necessary cooling-off period for Snabe.

I am skeptical, because Hopp's interest in his SAP is not the most intense.

"What a relief to have turned my back on the store in time.

SAP was sometimes too sluggish, yes, but on the other hand you didn't have to do everything immediately just because everyone else was doing it, but could take the time that complex software needs."

(Source: Mirror Online, SAP blog, August 1, 2013)

This also anonymous writer speaks from my heart!

The Mirror brought a text to the end of the SAP-double tip and on Mirror Online there was a wonderful blog to this.

And Hasso Plattner and Vishal Sikka want everything and they want it now.

I wonder: why don't they organize a start-up with Hasso's money and let the successful SAP-Are existing customers doing their work in peace?

Holistic, standard business software takes time and patience. Probably Sikka from R/1, R/2, R/3 and ERP 6.0 no idea:

The R/3-core is not only in ABAP written, but most ABAP-Tables also have German names and many code comments are also in German.

At my barbecue, I passed around Manager Magazine August to add some more heat to the Snabe/McDermott discussion: On page 45, there's a table titled.

"Reputation Balance. The Image of the 100 Most Important Group CEOs in Germany".

Jim Hagemann Snabe is in 25th place and his co-CEO Bill McDermott in 27th place.

Radiant winner with the best reputation is Martin Winterkorn from Volkswagen.

By the skin of his teeth, McDermott from the U.S. still managed a "good" in this list by Professor Joachim Schwalbach of Berlin's Humboldt University.

Let's hope that Hasso Plattner did not bet on the wrong horse and that McDermott will provide us with a safe SAP-The cliffs that have to be avoided are already visible.

Hana will not be a success.

Hana is good and Hana has its justification. There are very interesting, singular success stories, but Walldorf is not succeeding in turning it into a mass movement - as was once the case with the NetWeaver has succeeded.

What do you think about blueprinting? I was recently asked by our CCoE manager in the Switzerland.

I was in Zurich to meet a former SAP-CIO, who now works at a bank, when the language on IBM DB2 Blu came - in any case an interesting perspective for an upcoming ERP-Update.

The convincing argument of my CCoE manager: A database extension and optimization is in any case less risky than a database change!

So a little Blu to our DB2 is perhaps more compatible than DB2 against Hana to swap? We will see.