E3 Category: No/Name – Kolumne

A successful SAP Business Technology Platform partner summit took place in Heidelberg, Germany. The efforts to establish an open system alongside the frozen core are commendable. My proposal is that the BTP become public domain.

Regular readers of my column know that I am the co-head of an SAP regulars' club that now has 27 CIOs as members. The mood in the group is always good, although we are waiting for Christian Klein to reset.

Many are familiar with the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. The first time I tried to read the English original in 1989, I failed. However, after a lecture by AI pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, I purchased the German edition and devoured it from cover to cover.

I had lunch with our senior lawyer in the cafeteria the other day and we ended up staying until 5 in the afternoon. It wasn’t the food that made me feel ill, but rather his concerns about the use of generative AI in light of the GDPR.

SAP is a shell of its former self. It has everything other IT vendors lack: content and knowledge. However, hyperscalers have the technology.

Life is ever changing, and for whatever reason, the day may come when it is time to leave the cloud. SAP does not have a policy for this. Customers, however, should. They should have a cloud exit strategy plan in place.

Only about a third of the DSAG (German-speaking SAP User Group) members trust SAP's strategy. SAP CEO Christian Klein's visions are correct, but the way they are presented and communicated misses the mark with the SAP community.

There is pressure to act, which SAP CEO Christian Klein obviously does not feel. He spends his days doing petty repair work. He works dedicatedly and forgets the purpose and vision of SAP.

End-to-end business processes remind me of my early days with SAP R/3. A lot of things didn't work then, but when they did, they were consistent, evaluated, and definitely E2E. SAP CEO Klein talks a lot about integration.

A new ERP architecture is emerging, driven by SAP technology but less to SAP's own liking. CEO Christian Klein has already taken note of the first setbacks and lowered the revenue expectation for cloud computing.

There is pressure to act, which SAP CEO Christian Klein obviously does not feel. He spends his days doing small-scale repair work. Working with commitment and forgetting the big picture - Klein is left without a strategy.

SAP has taken a wrong turn: Instead of consolidating menus, screen masks and processes, a ChatGPT-like voice input is to be put over the disastrous UI. Why does SAP always start solving problems from the wrong side?