House announcement: CeBIT is dead

For those in charge, there have been cautionary examples in the public space and in the B2B scene: Many years ago, the once successful Systems died. When this was still at the old trade fair center in Munich and set the counterpoint to Hannover after the summer, no one could imagine that Systems would one day no longer exist.

Who in the SAP community still remembers the European Sapphires in Nice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt/M and Madrid? The Sapphire was once successful, too.

SAP Austria chartered a scheduled plane for each event and traveled with more than 200 existing customers and journalists. Today, there are no more Sapphires in the European region, although the innovative power of existing European customers is greater than ever.

The main impetus for the international SAP community still comes from Europe. Even if SAP development centers can be found all over the world, it is undisputed that Hana was invented in Potsdam at the Hasso Plattner Institute and ex-SAP CEO Professor Henning Kagermann is the "inventor" of Industry 4.0 in Berlin, and double-entry bookkeeping was developed in Venice in the 15th century.

There are enough topics, innovations, visions, SAP partners and existing customers to position a successful Sapphire in Europe as well - you just have to have the right concept!

Here, SAP failed completely. Top management and marketing failed to interpret the signs of the times and develop new concepts and event forms from them.

Systems in Munich, the European Sapphire are dead and CeBIT is dying. The new concept is the old one with a new date that was chosen extremely clumsily.

The calendar year traditionally begins with Fkom in Barcelona (SAP Field Kick-off Meeting), followed by CES in Las Vegas, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the World Economy Forum in Davos, the DSAG Technology Days, the Hannover Industrie Messe, and Sapphire USA in May with SAP and Asug (Americas SAP User Group).

And then CeBIT is supposed to follow in June? In June, you consolidate the findings of the previous events and clean up your desk before your summer vacation - who wants to go to Hanover sweating then?

The powder was shot in Barcelona, Davos, Hannover and Orlando, there will be nothing left for CeBIT. Going to Hanover in June to discuss innovations and orders that will not be substantiated until after the summer at the earliest makes little sense!

CeBIT is dead because innovative ideas are lacking, because there is no communication concept for this event - not even SAP organizes a CeBIT press conference, those responsible are content with a handshake from the Chancellor and a few nice press photos.

If you already had nothing to say at the "old" CeBIT, what do you want to communicate in June 2018? Until the speechlessness of IT providers like SAP and their partners is broken, any new trade show concept - regardless of the date - will fail.