Hybrid: not fish, not meat

At the annual field kick-off meeting, SAP's executive board told sales staff that from now on there would only be commissions for cloud products sold. The outcry and indignation were enormous - with the result that on-prem products and services lost their raison d'être. Even if the SAP existing customer wanted to order an on-prem product emphatically, the ears of SAP sales staff remained closed. Naturally, this state of affairs could not be sustained. In the meantime, compromises acceptable to sales were found and the problem moved on to SAP partners.

There are SAP partners who very successfully sell and customize exclusively SAP on-prem products. These partners will lose their SAP partner status at the end of the year because - see above - only cloud products are relevant for the status. Next week, SAP Connect, the partner summit, will take place in Hamburg, and SAP CEO Christian Klein will be there in person. Numerous partners want to take the SAP CEO to task, because now it's no longer about word games like "cloud first" or "cloud only", but about the existence of many SAP partners.

There is hope: At the DSAG annual congress in Leipzig, Christian Klein and his fellow board member Thomas Saueressig explained via video link that SAP is naturally prepared to think in hybrid dimensions and that on-prem systems naturally have their justification. In view of the figures collected by the user association, the two board members also had little choice. A large proportion of DSAG members want to remain on on-prem systems, even if they are not averse to a cloud in principle. Thus, the discussion focused on the term "hybrid cloud" - but without SAP offering a definition of this either-or answer.

SAP is probably still secretly hoping for a resounding cloud success, but this is becoming a distant prospect with the knowledge gained at the DSAG annual congress. In a completely overcrowded lecture hall, a Munich lawyer explained to SAP's existing customers who had traveled to Leipzig what is written in small print in SAP's cloud contracts: one day after the end of the contract term, SAP is entitled to delete all data in the cloud. As a precaution, cloud users will have no choice but to withdraw their data from the cloud and back it up with appropriate advance notice. Which brings us back to the lack of a cloud exit strategy, which E-3 Magazine already addressed two years ago and has been missing ever since.

SAP's cloud strategy is an immature, poorly communicated and incomplete offer to the SAP community. Resentment among existing customers and partners is high, yet the DSAG annual congress was largely harmonious between SAP and DSAG - but not all DSAG members were willing to accept this. Some wished for more resistance and opposition to SAP. DSAG Executive Board member Thomas Henzler gave a much-praised and sharp-tongued keynote address in Leipzig. He put his finger in the wound and called on SAP to make many improvements (see also the upcoming DSAG final report in E-3 Magazine November).

However, this critical and constructive stocktaking by Thomas Henzler did not seem sufficient to all DSAG members. At the association's annual general meeting, there was a scandal during the agenda item "Miscellaneous. Some DSAG members called for a much tougher approach to SAP. In the matter itself, this proposal also received recognition. For the time being, the members were unable to agree on a final, common approach. The fact is that SAP is bringing a lot of unrest into the community with this no-fish-no-meat policy and is contributing to a lot of unrest and uncertainty among existing customers with its current cloud strategy.