Intelligent Enterprise

My comment from E-3 May caused many and also fierce reactions - thank you for the engagement and the many important comments!

I remain grateful to DSAG board member Andreas Oczko for his devoted work on the topic of "indirect usage" (even if editor-in-chief Färbinger and some members of the IA4SP association disagree).

From many years of experience, I know about the difficulties and efforts involved in discussions and negotiations with SAP. Here, Executive Board member Oczko has shown stamina and staying power. And no, at the end of the DSAG/SAP talks, Andreas Oczko and DSAG did not file an antitrust suit in Berlin behind closed doors.

The complaint to the Federal Cartel Office comes from a different institution and seems to be similarly unsuccessful as the request two years ago: Weighed and found to be too light!

You won't find any CIO colleagues talking negatively about SAP. In the meantime, SAP's "power" is too extensive. No CIO can be expected to argue against SAP alone. The only chance I see is in our CIO working group at DSAG.

A united approach would rob SAP of the opportunity to punish individual companies and their CIOs. We know from the past that SAP is willing to take action against members of the SAP community by any means necessary, including on a personal level.

Criticism of SAP is fought with all means. Our in-house counsel disagrees! Former fellow students have brought the antitrust suit in Berlin and he thinks that this work is watertight. We'll know more at the DSAG congress in October in Leipzig.

The whole of SAP has been infected by the AI virus. Artificial intelligence is supposed to make things even better in the future. We don't know the exact details yet, but many SAP processes are to be optimized with machine and deep learning.

We have also jumped on the AI trend and have already created some prototypes with our colleagues from Siemens. There is potential here!

On the occasion of an in-house seminar, colleagues from Trumpf demonstrated a fascinating solution: The working noises of a machine tool are recorded via the microphone of a smartphone. The subsequent analysis shows whether an infirmity is emerging.

This intelligent solution was implemented based on the records of Trumpf service employees and the application of machine learning algorithms from a major cloud provider - not SAP, of course.

And that's my criticism: SAP wants to adorn itself with AI laurels, but if you look at competitors like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, they not only invest much more, but also started earlier.

SAP currently has no strategy for making up for lost time. On the contrary, what comes out of Walldorf as an "AI solution" is modest. Even existing SAP customers such as Daimler, Siemens, Bosch and we are investing more in AI and have more use cases.

The machine manufacturer Trumpf has deliberately opted for its own cloud system for the intelligent service of its existing customers' machine tools. The acoustic interface allows "machine data" to reach the Trumpf cloud without violating IP rights at the users.

Without a physical connection to the machines, first-class service can still be provided here. The strict separation of mold data and service data is a high security plus for users and providers - that is digital transformation!

Our SAP hopes for the "Intelligent Enterprise", but has few ideas and even less competence. If the old cooperation, the cohesion in the SAP community still worked - as it once did in R/2 and R/3 times - then I wouldn't worry.