Empire of the Geeks

My guests surprised me with a fantastic selection of t-shirts from an online geek store. The printed sayings a visual and linguistic treat:

"There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't."

The result was that we CIOs were confronted with a group of skeptical wives - the two groups I mentioned. My wife said, amused and resigned:

"He's turning all of Walldorf against himself. Why should it be any different at his barbecue?"

But I immediately reconciled them with the T-shirt:

"There's no place like 127.0.0.1"

Her posture told me that she also saw positive sides to me, but was not quite sure at the moment. I quickly provided the corresponding translation:

"There's no place like home!"

Connoisseurs of my E-3 column can guess which T-shirt I spent the glorious garden party wearing:

"21 is only half the truth"

Here is the explanation from Wikipedia:

"The answer '42' is the shortest and most famous quotation from the novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams. It is the answer to the question 'about life, the universe and all the rest', which in the novel has to be calculated by the second largest existing computer in the universe and '42' is shown to be correct with absolute certainty. In the end, the protagonists and readers of the novel can do nothing with the answer because no one knows what the real question was."

A colleague brought a current issue of the British business magazine The Economist to the garden party. The cover shows a human brain whose regions are not assigned to bodily functions but to IT companies.

Ultimately, this is a rough representation of Silicon Valley - supplemented by companies that do not have their headquarters there, such as IBM.

The Economist title:

"Empire of the geeks and what could wreck it"

Immediately, a few CIO colleagues pounced on this cover to see where The Economist's experts ultimately placed SAP alongside Google, Amazon and Salesforce. But SAP was not to be found on this IT brain map!

A lively discussion ensued about where SAP really stands now after all the disaster Bill McDermott has caused. What will happen to SAP in Walldorf when the gray eminence Gerd Oswald steps down next year and is succeeded by Michael Kleinemeier?

Kleinemeier will hold the dress rehearsal at the DSAG Congress - probably without Gerd Oswald at his side. So where can our SAP be located? What will be discussed in Bremen?

Officially, it will be about the speculative simplicity and speed of Hana. Since the departure of Vishal Sikka more than a year ago, the topic of Hana speed has only been presented cautiously, but simplicity has been emphasized all the more intensively - Bill McDermott: Run Simple!

But neither the attributes of speed nor simplicity deliver a demonstrable business or competitive advantage per se. The Hana discussion and presentation by SAP's new Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert will not go away - I can do without it!

Unofficially and in the working groups, however, there will again be a discussion about the new SAP license model - without Limited Professional User - and the maintenance fee in general.

Last year, Gerd Oswald and DSAG board member Andreas Oczko already engaged in a time-shifted war of words when each picked at the other's wounds with his keynote.

So far, our DSAG has not publicly commented on the loss of the Limited Professional User, but it will be inevitable at the annual convention.

Aside from the "cosmetic" changes to the SAP price list, the existing climate in the community is much more troubling. A common desire for productive togetherness has turned into hostile revenue maximization.

Never before have our DSAG and the Walldorfers been so distrustful and hostile towards each other.

What still doesn't work are the business and use cases! Collect social media data, combine it with weather data and add your own data from ERP, CRM and BW - calculated with Hana, you know within a few milliseconds how many fans and wine refrigerators you still need in this hot summer. Run Simple!

Unfortunately, I found no more fans in the surrounding hardware stores. Answer: The head office does not want to order 3000 pieces anymore and there is also a lack of storage space. Here, someone is foregoing additional business because the general conditions are different.

"Run simple" just works only in the heads of SAP employees, the real world is more complex. There were no more wine refrigerators either.

noname@pe3.greatsolution.dev