Low-SAP/No-SAP

My wife thinks that the young father of a family should be given some time off, and she reminds me of the beginning of our family. In the meantime, our two children are out of the house and standing on their own two feet. Christian Klein, however, is at the start of two challenging careers - as a family man and SAP CEO.

Apart from the stock market price, which as we know was and is the playing field of ex-SAP CEO Bill McDermott, Christian Klein is doing many things right at the moment. However, Klein does not have the deft hand and feel for the sensitivities of investors and financial analysts that his predecessor did.

Bill McDermott has already nearly doubled the share price at his new employer ServiceNow in the middle of the pandemic. My wife, who once met McDermott in person in Berlin, thinks he's a phony.

In Manager Magazin, Eva Müller analyzed current media reports. The result: "McDermott's clear and visionary leadership has given SAP stock a real lift," he said. However, I doubt that Müller, who is an outstanding SAP expert, would also personally attest to the ex-chief executive's clear and visionary leadership. My guess: Eva Müller tends more toward my wife's opinion.

As an existing SAP customer and Group CIO, I am more concerned with the joint activities of our three musketeers: Christian Klein, Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig. Even though I know that SAP Supervisory Board member Gerd Oswald is in the background, the challenge for the three of them should not be underestimated - and in 2021, things will really get underway - technically for Müller and application-wise for Saueressig.

Christian Klein may have managed the turnaround at the very last second - pardon the Anglicism. The integration, the consolidation of the ERP quantity structure and the master data (MDM) as well as the return to SAP's core competence - everything starts from the document and leads to the document - are his plans. Together with Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig, Christian Klein will probably succeed in this challenging work. He will be sure of applause from us existing customers, driven by our DSAG.

But all the successes of the SAP Executive Board cannot stop the rapid pace of technical IT development: With the cloud capabilities of hyperscalers, data management in hybrid IT architectures, open source offerings from Suse and Red Hat, and the growing low-code/no-code platforms, we existing SAP customers can continue to emancipate ourselves from SAP and think outside the box.

In my IT departments, many young SAP specialists and programmers are fascinated by the low-code and no-code platforms. Of course, these young people can also do Javascript, PHP, Python, C++ and other object-oriented programming languages, but with a visual command interface it is faster including Scrum as well as DevOps.

Christian Klein deserves credit for his efforts to save SAP's core business, but he and his predecessor ran the Leonardo innovation platform into the ground. This is not a disadvantage for us existing customers, because there are numerous alternatives on the market, but SAP has recklessly given away a trump card - with the result that in the future, many developments around ERP and its further development will take place with no-SAP products or weak participation by SAP (low-SAP).

Older semesters (50 plus) still know the numerous individual programming with Fortran, Cobol, PL/1 and also Assembler. Then came the era of standard business software - not only at SAP in Walldorf, but also at Heinz Nixdorf in Paderborn. With low-code/no-code platforms, hybrid cloud architectures, AI, blockchain, etc., it is once again becoming efficient and successful to implement your own ideas in a very individual way.

Here it could turn out that we existing customers need SAP much less than in the past, that Christian Klein continues to do everything right, but that it is no longer relevant. SAP under the leadership of CEO Klein must be careful not to die in beauty. I wish you much IT success and continued health for 2021 - with and without SAP.