Perfectly calibrated and on course!

I was once again in Walldorf with friends, of whom there are fewer and fewer. Even more worrying is the fact that the mood was very frosty.

SAP employees are complex, heterogeneous, innovative, disruptive, but have always been loyal to the company. Even though Dietmar Hopp has long since stopped roaming the SAP offices, the team spirit he instilled in the company is still present.

Henning Kagermann, Gerd Oswald and many other executives have carried this team spirit forward over many years. The first break came under former CEO Léo Apotheker.

After that, the dual leadership of Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott saw a significant recovery - until McDermott mobbed his CEO colleague Snabe.

It didn't help that Professor Plattner very quickly made Snabe a member of the Supervisory Board. Even before the opportunity arose for Snabe to succeed Supervisory Board Chairman Hasso Plattner, Jim Snabe was already at Siemens.

Under the sole reign of Bill McDermott, SAP has been reoriented - the direction is right, but too many mistakes are being made in the details: "Cloud First" with the B2B version of Hybrid Cloud is not just ours.

But why was it necessary to buy a company like Qualtrics for seven billion euros? SAP is appalled by this unilateral move, and many are asking why Plattner did not intervene. Or did it happen with the express approval of the chairman of the supervisory board? Did two alpha dogs play tricks on each other here?

The fact is that for the upcoming Sapphire keynote in Orlando at the beginning of May, Bill McDermott needs a spectacular introduction and talking point that will distract from the existing personnel problems (Goerke, Leukert and Enslin) in the long term.

My friends at SAP have already told me about very hectic preparations. After the failed renaming of Hybris to C/4, this time the perfect Hollywood spectacle is to succeed with Qualtrics. So far, C/4 has not been able to do anything to Salesforce's success. And the success stories about C/4 are merely rewritten Hybris project reports.

In the realm of Bill McDermott, there is a lack of content, innovation and contribution margin - which keeps the SAP share price hovering around 100 euros. A breakout to the upside is not in sight in view of the lack of executives and ideas.

The mood in Walldorf is also very frosty because Hasso Plattner and Bill McDermott have created a personnel disaster that has triggered a catastrophic domino effect, starting with Jürgen Müller.

Why did the young HPI student Jürgen Müller (Hasso Plattner Institute) absolutely and immediately have to become Chief Technology Officer? I and also my DSAG colleagues were not always enthusiastic about the work and progress of my friend Bernd Leukert.

He was trained and brought on as a service board member by Gerd Oswald. The handover from Michael Kleinemeier to Bernd Leukert could have been an SAP success story. The kick-off was successful.

Or was it completely different:

"Dear Bill, you get to buy Qualtrics and I get the position of chief technology officer for Jürgen Müller - Björn Goerke and Bernd Leukert are our pawns."

In any case, Hasso Plattner does not have the same flair for personnel selection and management as his SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp. Accordingly, people in Walldorf are not only appalled by the Qualtrics takeover, but also by the personnel planning.

When Rob Enslin was the last domino to fall, Bill McDermott's cloud strategy finally imploded. The remaining dominoes are pointing in the right direction, but this is little consolation in view of the general situation, because the personnel chaos is perfect.

The all-important integration of the various cloud construction sites is not being handled by the Chief Technology Officer - once Bernd Leukert, now Jürgen Müller - as in the past, but by the non-technicians Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan. Both are experienced executives, but without an IT background: SAP's cloud in the wrong hands.