ABC/4 Hana

An APO relaunch will be presented at Sapphire 2019 as A/4 Hana, in the past the SAP community was graced with BW/4 and now this year there was C/4.

In the interview, Hasso Plattner emphasized how important it is to give things and projects euphonious names so that identification and inspiration set in. I think that the only inspiration with C/4 Hana was the fear of Salesforce.

The American CRM provider has two very big advantages over SAP: There have not been quite as many and expensive company acquisitions, and it is less ideologized.

While proofreading the column, my wife stumbled over the word "ideologized," so I took the liberty of adding a few sentences here afterwards: As far as CRM and ERP are concerned, there is a radical E2E philosophy at SAP, I explain to my wife.

In other words: You don't want to see third-party products in an SAP's end-to-end process, if you do, then there's the "indirect use" penalty.

For Bill McDermott, maximizing revenue and tripling the stock price is the top priority. The focus is not on the existing SAP customer with his needs and wishes, but on the closed business process consisting of SAP software based on Hana.

There should be no other business software besides SAP and this paradigm should be secured by the lever "indirect use" and the framework Leonardo.

For McDermott, it's really conceivable that existing customers operate exclusively with SAP software. My wife shakes her head: "That's what you always say, to think holistically, to practice the 360-degree view - then poor Bill does that and you're not satisfied again."

Yes and no: For a greenfield project, C/4 plus S/4 may be a very appealing task, but we existing customers think in brownfield terms with lots of legacy issues and memories of past CRM walking attempts by SAP.

ABC/4 Hana is a real weapon for Bill McDermott to capture the global B2B IT market. My people around the world feel this aggressiveness every day when SAP sales people visit.

C/4 Hana must and will fail because the E2E process from prospect to order and production to delivery (CRM/ERP) is far too long, too complex, and too heterogeneous to be adequately or completely covered by the two products C/4 and S/4.

I discussed this internally and everyone rejected it, not only my CIO colleagues around the world, but also many department heads.

Put simply, individuality to external customers is more important than internal normalization to C/4 and S/4. There are markets and situations where Hybris is the best choice, but similar is true for Adobe and other marketing and e-commerce software vendors.

What we need is master data management. The data silos need to be consolidated and open to everyone. We now have several teams working on the SAP Data Hub and other MDM and compliance software.

Personally, I like the technical term "golden record" - verified, consolidated master data that is available to all applications. This ultimately allows good E2E processes to be realized with a 360-degree perspective.

And AI again: SAP has claimed that, according to a survey of 2,500 top executives, nine out of ten are convinced that artificial intelligence will be crucial to their company's survival in the next five years.

I don't know if SAP has checked with our hundreds of top managers, but none of our managers would deny the importance of Machine/Deep Learning. Globally, we have approval for pilot projects with the cloud AI frameworks from AWS, Google and Microsoft, including their open source software.

However, what my friend Bernd Leukert means by the following statement is incomprehensible to me: "S/4 Hana Cloud is the only product in the ERP market that provides companies with the comprehensive intelligence they need to outperform their competitors and continue to achieve excellence."