Realtime versus Intelligent

Realtime is the state when a system provides answers exactly when they are expected by the user. Accordingly, realtime does not mean that it has to happen immediately. If a process takes an hour for physical reasons, it is perfectly sufficient if the ERP system also says after an hour where the goods are to be delivered. In the past, however, it often took much longer. The process was completed, but the ERP system still did not give any feedback. So Hasso Plattner developed the Hana database system to enable the ERP system to respond in a timely manner - in real time.

So the next evolutionary step after R/3 with AnyDB (IBM, Oracle and Microsoft) could never be a real-time enterprise - that is, an ERP system that supports its users in real time. What SAP has made of this over the past ten years is disappointing and shameful.

Instead of taking a self-critical approach, SAP executives and partners only sang praises in view of Hana and later S/4 - even cloud computing was welcomed without criticism. SAP and its partners love each other, where critical questioning and thinking would actually be necessary. However, this betrayed and watered down Professor Hasso Plattner's once brilliant idea: The Realtime Enterprise became an Intelligent Enterprise, of which no one could say what it was actually supposed to represent. The wrath of Hasso Plattner, the father of the gods, is justified.