DevOps by SAP

I was very excited about the first Sapphire after Bernd Leukert's sacking. During my last visit to Walldorf, I had already been hinted that it would not be Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller on the Sapphire stage, but McDermott confidant Christian Klein.

Thus, I instructed my assistant to turn up the speaker when COO Klein appeared. Together we admired the COO's fight for survival on the Sapphire stage in the livestream. Whether it will be a similar fight in September in Nuremberg at our DSAG annual congress, we will see.

Christian Klein is not stupid, but inexperienced, so he is wrong with some approaches and was completely out of his depth on stage in Orlando. In the end, he told us in very flowery words what should be, could be and maybe will be. One of the core ideas of the five SAP founders is "integration" - in other words: The Single Point of Truth.

Klein has been given the task by McDermott to finally bring the integration of the purchased cloud applications to an end (after my friend Bernd Leukert apparently failed with it).

The curious thing for me about this spooky situation is that a non-technician (McDermott) gives a non-technician (Klein) a very difficult and technical integration assignment, and Chief Technology Officer Jürgen Müller stands by and watches idly. Where is Hasso Plattner and Supervisory Board member Gerd Oswald's corrective?

Board member Christian Klein is burned out, exploited and abused. He is made responsible for every cross-divisional issue. He has to open the multi-purpose hall built together with Red Bull in Munich and help decide the name of the SAP hall in a ridiculous lottery.

Chief Operating Officer Klein has to show German Chancellor Angela Merkel around the SAP stand in Hanover because neither SAP CEO McDermott himself nor his Chief Technology Officer Müller were available at the world's largest industrial trade fair.

If Christian Klein doesn't come up with something better by the time of his planned DSAG keynote, there will be the first whistle concert at a DASG congress. Because he will fail in Nuremberg with his Sapphire keynote. At our most important event, he is confronted with critical and constructive grassroots people and CIOs who are very close to the grassroots.

He will not convince the DSAG audience with visions, promises and possibilities. Eight people from my staff will be going to Nuremberg and I expect them to come back with concrete and crystal-clear answers.

Our DSAG CEO Marco Lenck has already set the bar high for Christian Klein in a Sapphire statement:

"Ariba, Hybris, Concur, Fieldglass, Callidus and most recently Qualtrics: SAP's acquisition policy in recent years has led to a massive need to bring systems and master data together.

We see that the solutions purchased from SAP still involve certain integration difficulties. We have already communicated to SAP that the integration of the individual components is not yet satisfactory."

"We may have taken a year or two too long with integration"

SAP Executive Board member Christian Klein told Handelsblatt in indirect response to Marco Lenck.

"That makes it all the more important that the Group is now focusing on this - for example, there are dedicated personnel for this, and there are already many integrated business processes."

A friend told me that Hasso Plattner said in Orlando that he would leave all legacy issues behind, go to the SAP public cloud and build suitable bridges to Qualtrics with SAP tools, for example. Plattner as bridge builder versus Klein the integrator?

I think - and the DSAG Annual Congress can also provide an answer to this - that we need to emancipate ourselves further from SAP. SAP still delivers excellent business concepts and applications, but we should obtain databases, cloud platforms, middleware, operating systems, security, IoT, AI, etc. from other sources. Existing customers are responsible for operations, so we should also choose our developers and suppliers very carefully.