ERP and AI: stability and 99 percent availability

SAP describes itself as a „cloud company“, which of course is not true, because SAP's core competence is ERP and not an IT operating model such as client/server, virtualization or cloud computing. A lot can be learned, acquired and purchased. Nevertheless, the saying applies to us: stick to your last!

Even the hyperscalers get caught out from time to time - and their cloud data centers and global fibre optic cables have occasional outages. In a modern, networked IT society, 99.999 percent availability is therefore standard. Experts also say that five nines is the minimum for ERP and supply chain management.

SAP is sometimes a long way from meeting these requirements: the SAP for Me administration portal and dashboard keep going dark. This is extremely annoying and unproductive for my colleagues from the CCoE. My SAP regulars report similar things. SAP is not a company with focus and expertise in cloud computing. I don't blame the SAP managers for this, but the failure in the cloud should be clearly addressed and consequences should be drawn from the failures.

Everything used to be better: When SAP rose to become the global ERP market leader, it was only logical that IT services and products that were not part of its core competence were purchased. The necessary databases came from Microsoft, Oracle or IBM. The middleware came from HP, CA and IBM. It was similar with the operating systems. My very first R/3 system was based on IBM AIX with RS/6000 hardware and an Oracle database. We were all very satisfied!

Stability, the first chapter: In 2010, SAP tried its hand at an in-memory computing database under the leadership of Professor Hasso Plattner. At HPI in Potsdam, he and Professor Alexander Zeier developed a new generation of database with the help of SAP CTO and Executive Board member Vishal Sikka, which stored all the data in the server's main memory.

This innovation from Potsdam is currently known as SAP Hana and, after fifteen years, is running with sufficient stability. But all of my regulars can tell at least five anecdotes from a time when Hana could only fulfill the weekly workload with numerous software updates. Stable operation was hardly possible in the early days and yet SAP was loudly promoting the product SoH (Suite on Hana)!

Stability, the second chapter: SAP wanted and had to move to the cloud, although the ERP group had hardly any experience of this step. Former SAP CEO Bill McDermott tried acquisitions, which were not unsuccessful at the beginning. The problems began when it came to the further development of the HR software SuccessFactors, for example. It quickly became apparent that cloud computing is a field of knowledge in its own right, and SuccessFactors from SAP was correspondingly unstable.

Stability, the third chapter: this currently concerns the SAP portal SAP for Me, an important IT tool for our CCoE team. Time and again, there are interruptions and malfunctions here, meaning that only parts of this dashboard can be used. So this time it's not affecting productive ERP systems. But it is annoying in any case, as my SAP regulars' table unanimously emphasizes.
However, future systems such as SAP BTP and BDC as well as AI agents will require and demand one hundred percent availability.

I don't want to imagine an AI agent wandering around aimlessly and haphazardly in our S/4 system. The damage caused by an uncontrolled and autonomously acting AI agent could be astronomically high. Who would assume liability in such a case? I think that SAP's efforts around AI are relevant and correct, but far too little focus is placed on operational security, IT stability and 100 percent availability. SAP is a leader in end-to-end business processes, but it is not an engineering company.