Potemkin village

The Russian field marshal and imperial prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin is often cited as the inventor of "fake news" and "alternative facts" - but this does him an injustice.

The lover of Catherine II and ingenious organizer as well as businessman was anything but a dazzler. His flourishing landscapes really existed in the Russian tsarist empire. Only his enemies claimed that his success was only a mirage, a dazzle and a hollow facade.

S/4 and Hana are supposed to be just a hollow facade? SAP CEO Bill McDermott just a phony? The SAP Cloud Platform a mirage? SAP's existing customers can assume that Bill McDermott is as brilliant a businessman as Imperial Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was over 200 years ago.

He created something new and built flourishing landscapes in the south of the tsarist empire, where the land was snatched from the Turks. The Russian administrative genius created great things and at the same time hid them behind false house fronts and colorful backdrops.

"Deceive the emperor by inviting him to a house on the seashore, which is really a disguised ship, and thus induce him to cross the sea." From: The Secret Book of the Art of War, 36 Stratagems for Managers by Harro von Senger, Carl Hanser Verlag 2004.

Sometimes in life it is very advisable to hide the real achievements and present "alternative facts". Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin hid massive fortifications, pompous sacral buildings and other successes behind lovely village scenery and flowering meadows. Potemkin villages existed 200 years ago - only they served a different purpose!

Bill McDermott is affectionately embracing hyperscalers AWS, Google and Microsoft and calling it "Embrace. It is a program designed to make existing SAP customers believe that SAP software is available everywhere and at low cost. S/4 is supposed to convince existing customers to be on the roadmap to a new ERP era. Hana is supposed to be the singular key to real-time data processing.

Behind Embrace, S/4 and Hana are real products, but the facade gives a false picture: SAP's ruthless licensing rules also apply in the AWS, Google and Microsoft cloud. S/4 is easy for any SAP partner to customize because at its core is the old ERP/ECC 6.0 code.

Hana is just as fast as comparable databases that also store data in memory. The Potemkin (Wall) village can only be recognized at second glance - all the more reason for SAP's existing customers to be vigilant.