Flying Blind Through the SAP Community

Of course, not everything was better in the past, but under Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Henning Kagermann, Gerd Oswald, and also Michael Kleinemeier, Werner Brandt, and Claus Heinrich, cohesion and communication were more open and direct, better. SAP sales people are now the bearers of bad news: you, the SAP customer, are missing licenses! Here is our current PCL (SAP price and conditions list).

I thought that only we customers were suffering from SAP's new communication culture, but Editor-in-Chief Färbinger told me that SAP has stopped almost all communication. Apparently, analysts and journalists used to be invited by SAP to the Sapphire event. Due to SAP's lack of involvement, the german magazine Handelsblatt's Editor-in-Chief, an analyst from PAC in Munich, and of course E3 magazine stayed home this year.

However, Editor-in-Chief Färbinger had lunch with SAP's top communications executive and was asked how he sees SAP's future. The answer should be clear to anyone who regularly reads his editorial. The answer of the SAP spokeswoman seems to be much more revealing: if the expected development did not jeopardize the current stock price—which is doing quite well—then everything should be fine, right?

Precision landing despite flying blind: SAP CEO Christian Klein has no idea what is going on in the SAP community, but he is lulled into a false sense of security because the SAP share price is at an all-time high. SAP lives and works only for the share price—the rest are trifles that nobody at SAP cares about.

From our SAP regulars' table: a former SAP executive, who took the golden handshake a few years ago and has been working as a freelance consultant ever since, is now helping a long-time SAP customer implement an APO (Advanced Planner and Optimizer) successor. Of course, it is not SAP IBP (Integrated Business Planning), because this SAP offering is only available in the cloud and therefore not calculable for many manufacturing companies. The APO successor will be an SCM tool from a Canadian IT provider.

Additionally, cloud-native vendor Workday is on the rise. SAP can only defend itself through malice! One of my regulars was asked by SAP to make the claim that Workday Finance is not HGB-compliant— how could that be, Workday is a US vendor. Of course, the claim is false and misleading. SAP itself knows better, but testing will probably be allowed anyway. The origin of this story goes back more than twenty years, when Oracle came to Europe with American software and was shocked by the different currencies and laws. Workday knows the German market, so SAP's accusation falls flat.

The crux of the matter from our SAP regular’s table, including confirmation from many SAP partners I spoke with: SAP has no idea about the state of the SAP community, the concerns of our DSAG (German-speaking SAP User Group), and customers’ needs. On the one hand, SAP is living in a bubble, and on the other hand, SAP CEO Christian Klein and his current team are flying blind. The departure of Professor Plattner as Chairman of the Supervisory Board will only exacerbate this fatal situation, since his replacement is a technician who led Nokia to ruin because he misjudged the markets and was blind to global trends.

SAP is selling its blind flight as a successful path to a glorious S/4 cloud future. The stock market believes this fairy tale, and the share price is impressive, but we DSAG members and the entire SAP community know better. This cannot go on. Many of my regular customers are already looking for alternatives. SAP is losing relevance, see the DSAG investment survey from this year. SAP CEO Christian Klein's blind flight is supposed to be enlightened by AI, which of course won't happen because AI is just another tool like cloud computing. What SAP's customers need are solutions—digital transformation processes—not more IT tools.