Forward, Always Forward

We spent the holidays at home in June. We tended the garden and I prepared for my annual CIO barbecue. My son also came to visit and brought a piece of wood, a small board, and half of a fresh salmon.

I already know how to grill it, I said in the direction of my wife. "Let yourself be inspired by new ideas for once," she replied. My son explained that the board should be soaked for an hour, then warmed on both sides in the charcoal grill and finally you could steam and grill the salmon with lemons and rosemary on it.

Yes, always something new, always moving forward, the old and tried and tested no longer applies - as it does for us in the IT sector. My wife tried very diplomatically to mediate between her son and me.

After an excellent, juicy and aromatic piece of salmon with several glasses of Côtes de Provence, an exciting discussion developed about fast forward and strategic waiting.

"The Chinese are overtaking us," my son said. Not because they are smarter or faster, but because they have a different history.

The Chinese Internet generation had never owned workstations and PCs and very few tablets. These users have moved directly into the mobile computing era with millions of smartphones.

Many app developers in China only know smartphones, while here - see Facebook - cumbersome PC programs first have to be made fit for smartphones.

And then came the expected "killer question": And how do we keep it up in the Group and at SAP with innovations, renewals, relaunches and re-engineering? Who is putting the brakes on? And who says forward, always forward?

Naturally, at the beginning of every project, you have to distinguish between greenfield and brownfield. Is there any legacy? A PC and its DOS programs or just a new smartphone?

We have factories in the group where ancient PCs still do their job, all too often there is no documentation and TCP/IP pinging over the network is strictly forbidden so that the weak processor doesn't get out of step.

By the way: Such "IT islands" are a blatant security risk in our IT landscape. Together with Cisco, we are trying to work out a security concept that is anchored in the network and thus does not require any intervention at the clients.

We are therefore pursuing a mixed strategy in the Group that attempts to meet the digital transformation and does not destroy the tried and tested. That sounds like evolution, but given the hundreds of applications and thousands of users, it's a pragmatic approach:

SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert can tell me as much as he wants about fast Hana release changes! The issue is not forward, always forward, but investment protection, reliability, transparency and the training of thousands of employees.

We don't connect one IoT sensor to a smartphone app via the SAP cloud, but we have thousands of CNC machines with hundreds of sensors: Big Data!

And SAP?

The motto there is: Forward, always forward! Without consideration for existing customers and partners, this "innovative" strategy seems to become a big problem for us.

"Afraid of change?" my wife asks me as we open the third bottle of Côtes de Provence on the terrace with our son.

No, I assert confidently. If progress is based on a stable foundation, I have nothing against digital transformation and revolution. But SAP is rushing headlong into the topic of machine/deep learning - because that's what everyone is doing now.

Hana is obviously not suitable for this, so they use hardware from Nvidia and software from Google. If someone had predicted three years ago that I would have to approve a research project and a purchase requisition for Nvidia, I would have smirked.

Here, even my son agrees with me; back then, he too would not have imagined that the graphics cards of his game PC could become the basis for Deep Learning and neural networks.

I can well imagine the application of machine learning, but I don't get a good feeling about it at SAP. Here, Bill McDermott and Bernd Leukert are running behind a trend. Strategic partnerships and a focus on core competence would probably be a better solution for AI tasks.

The situation is similar with cloud computing: forward to the cloud! But which cloud? Amazon, Google, Microsoft or SAP? There are no answers to this, because "cloud first" is not the answer.

Here, every SAP existing customer is once again on his or her own. This makes the title of the upcoming DSAG Annual Congress very well chosen: Between the Worlds - SAP Surges Forward, Always Forward, and Existing Customers and Partners Sit Between All Stools.

I don't want to stand between Hana and Nvidia/TensorFlow (Google) because McDermott and Leukert like it that way. I want a stable world in which I can build something. Between the worlds is not an option!