Dropouts and failures

The saying is widely known: Do good and talk about it! A lot of work has been done in Walldorf over the past two years. The young team around SAP CEO Christian Klein has been hard at work, but obviously no one thought to communicate the good deeds. Due to the lack of communication, many were misunderstood and misinterpreted.

In Düsseldorf at the DSAG Technology Days, Jürgen Müller praised the successes of his team in the area of Business Warehouse and SAP Analytics Cloud. A lot of resources have been invested in improving the user experience in terms of speed and operation. When asked what the speed was all about, given that SAP's warehouse is based on Hana, supposedly the fastest in-memory computing database, Müller had to correct himself: Of course, nobody in Walldorf has touched the Hana database because it really is beyond any lack of performance. The improvements only affected the front end and the apps. It was about optimizing the Java code and other processes upstream of Hana.

In the end, Jürgen Müller gave a simple explanation that everyone could understand, but this cannot hide the sad fact that SAP's basic communication is in great need of improvement. The reasons for the lapses, failures and speechlessness are difficult to analyze: Is it incompetence, disrespect for the SAP community, negligence, lack of resources or sloppiness? I don't know. But I can see the catastrophic effects on the SAP community.

I have a good relationship with Jürgen Müller and such misunderstandings are quickly cleared up in a friendly dialog. Due to its size, no SAP board member can now talk to every DSAG and community member personally. SAP has to rely on functioning platforms for communication such as DSAG and E-3. However, for this distribution of information to work successfully, it must start with the right, verified content and this can only come from SAP itself.

However, finding the right tone and the right content is no trivial task and the SAP community is not a consolidated mass, but a very heterogeneous entity, as was evident at the SAP Annual General Meeting a few days ago: Shareholders and shareholder representatives debated SAP's age clause and whether Professor Hasso Plattner can and should run for another two-year term as Chairman of the Supervisory Board.

From the perspective of an existing SAP customer, this discussion may seem petty, modest and irrelevant: What does two years mean in an S/4 conversion project? Instead of discussing two years in the SAP Supervisory Board, the shareholders should have asked whether Hana and S/4 are still up to date, what comes after S/4 and whether SAP shares will still have any value in 2030 in the absence of a strategy and vision from the Executive Board and Supervisory Board. What will be the unique selling point and thus the value of SAP shares in 2030 if every IT company and every app is really located in the cloud?