Farm of SAP existing customers

Ever since the federal chairman of the German Jusos, Kevin Kühnert, reinterpreted the topic of "nationalization" in a completely new way, new ideas are constantly appearing on the agenda about how to reorganize what, when and where politically.

There has been such a "revolution" in the SAP community before, and apparently Professor Hasso Plattner remembers that time very well, when Dietmar Hopp was the CEO. Plattner also mentioned the version change from R/2 to R/3 at this year's Sapphire.

It was a difficult time for SAP because it was a conceptual shift from mainframe to client/server computing. At Sapphire, Plattner argued that when the time came, it was also necessary to leave old burdens behind and dare to do something new.

At that time, R/2's existing customers were up in arms, and Plattner and his comrades-in-arms would have chased them away - like the animals in George Orwell's text "Animal Farm. It would probably have ended the same way, as can be read in the dystopian fable: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal."

The idea at the time: SAP wanted to push existing R/2 customers to switch to R/3 in a very short time - quite similar to today's situation: from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 including Hana by 2025.

At that time, resistance was forming! Some German chemical and pharmaceutical companies threatened SAP to take the maintenance of R/2 into their own hands and thus also develop the product further, because nobody wanted to switch to the young R/3 at that time.

Hasso Plattner referred to this difficult situation for all parties in his Sapphire keynote this year. At the time, the dispute ended well for SAP: An agreement was reached on longer transition periods so that the investment of existing R/2 customers was not lost.

In parallel, R/3 was evaluated and after a few years R/3 really was the better ERP. Users stayed with SAP and continued to pay the annual service fee. The split in the SAP community was averted.

Whether this diplomatic feat will succeed a second time or the dystopian fable in the SAP scene will become reality this time, the coming years will show. Perhaps all those involved should read George Orwell's "Animal Farm" again in advance.

This time, it's not just IT companies that are standing by for third-party maintenance. The switch to S/4 is also associated with high costs, so that some existing SAP customers are already thinking about the chance to leave the SAP scene altogether with this investment. In addition, there is the "forced" change of the database: Nothing speaks against Hana, but much speaks for Oracle, DB2 and MS-SQL. The outcome of the S/4 fable is still open.