Good times, bad times

With the Hana database, SAP has left the path of virtue. Professor Hasso Plattner was rightly dissatisfied with his SAP. He retreated to his university institute in Potsdam and discussed the future of ERP with his students. The discourse was a complete success: The next stage of evolution could only be a real-time enterprise - that is, an ERP system that supports its users in real time.

What SAP has made of it over the past ten years is disappointing and shameful. The bad mood of Plattner, the father of the gods, is justified. Instead of taking a self-critical approach, SAP executives and partners only sang praises in view of Hana and later S/4 - even cloud computing was welcomed without criticism. SAP and its partners love each other, where critical questioning and thinking would actually be necessary. However, Professor Hasso Plattner's once brilliant idea was thus betrayed and watered down: the Realtime Enterprise became an Intelligent Enterprise, of which no one could say what it was actually supposed to represent. The wrath of the father of the gods is justified.

Good times, bad times alternate in real life. SAP is in a permanent crisis mode. SAP CEO Christian Klein fails to lead the ERP global company out of the bad times. The share price is underground. Acceptance among existing customers is muted. The partners are disillusioned and unwilling. Existing customers, on the other hand, are motivated and innovative. The result: bad times in the SAP community, good times with competitors like Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, ServiceNow, AWS and Google.

SAP CEO Christian Klein still has the sympathy of his existing customers, while on the one hand godfather Plattner is still right and on the other hand the best executives are leaving the ERP group. Christian Klein alone at home? There is a lack of input and brainstorming. Hana, S/4 and cloud computing are too little to excite existing customers, investors and financial analysts.