Author: Peter M. Färbinger, E3-Magazin

Most of what SAP does is fundamentally correct. The global market leader in ERP cannot be accused of deliberate misconduct. Yet, SAP's share price is falling, and the mood within the SAP community is grim. The world of SAP and the world of ERP users are no longer aligned.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is entering the AI arena as a key enabler and strategic foundation for innovation and expansion. However, many technical and licensing issues remain unresolved. Will SAP BTP be a game changer for SAP customers?

It's common knowledge that AI feeds off the vastness of the World Wide Web. For AI, texts, photos, videos, and graphics are the source of "knowledge." ChatGPT and similar programs provide the answers. But what if the sources dry up?

Either SAP has misunderstood the word "sovereignty," or the global ERP market leader is selfishly interpreting it to its own advantage. Rather than strengthening and mobilizing its customers to make them more competitive—in other words, to make them sovereign—SAP is merely expanding its vendor lock-in system.

Members of the SAP community from the R/2 and R/3 era have fond memories of the CCC. The Customer Competence Center provided first-level support to existing SAP customers through their own IT departments. Because SAP obviously considers everything that comes from a successful on-premise era to be „the devil's work,“ the CCC became the CCoE, or Customer Center of Expertise. An experiment!

In an interview for the German-language medium Computerwelt.de, SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig defined a Frankenstein ERP architecture, shortly after his Executive Board colleague Muhammad Alam warned of the danger of an ERP patchwork quilt.

SAP's commitment to AI is like a glaze poured over everything and everyone. The main thing is that it tastes like artificial intelligence.

Boomi is opening up another data channel in the SAP universe, giving SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) considerable competition with the Databricks extension. It remains to be seen who will ultimately win the race for the final ERP data platform.

SAP is also entering the field of AI agents. Apart from the imminent surplus of AI agents compared to ERP users, the paradigm persists due to a lack of expertise on the part of the users.

At the end of AI development, there will also be a small language model at SAP. SAP is now content with small successes. Based on its own Abap tables, mechanisms such as machine learning are to be used as a supplement to SAP PAL. Uncertain added value?

SAP customers want and need cloud, AI, and IT platforms. SAP has good offerings with Joule, Cloud ERP, BTP, and BDC. However, the licenses and IT conditions do not align with users' ERP reality. SAP does not understand its customers, and vice versa.

A prankster who thinks evil! The DSAG Annual Congress 2025 in Bremen is over. The biggest scandal in Bremen? Quite simply: there was no scandal - everything was soft-washed and critical issues were sorted out in good time. The DSAG members were left out in the cold.