SAP Has Found the Golden Record

Ten years of S/4, and SAP is still worrying and trembling about whether the final S/4 conversion will be successful. No ERP release change has been tortured over such a long period of time. When all seemed lost, SAP CEO Christian Klein Rise pulled a rabbit out of his hat like an inexperienced magician. "Think about our SAP shares," my wife says to me. She has never been interested in stocks. But she is impressed by SAP's performance because she likes Christian Klein and his CFO, Dominik Asam. Full disclosure: my wife's best friend used to work for Dominik Asam at Siemens.

SAP's share price is at odds with the failures of our customers. We are also hesitant about several aspects in many areas of our company. A release change to S/4 costs a good deal of resources and in some cases brings no added value. The SAP share price is currently moving in only one direction. Our ERP strategy has become quite heterogeneous over the last few years due to the wishes of our end users.

We have very successful S/4 Public Cloud deployments in some organizations. However, many ECC installations with SAP BTP are also successful. SAP Business Suite 7 on Hana is still a strong and good-natured ERP workhorse. The addition of the SAP Business Technology Platform brings new topics such as AI and robotic process automation to the applications. And as Group CIO, I am pursuing a strict clean-core approach across the board.

However, the topic of data management at SAP seems to be characterized by failures. In the early years, I remember a lively discussion about MDM (Master Data Management—not to be confused with Mobile Device Management, MDM, which also existed at SAP at one point). The golden record has been a defined term in the IT scene for many decades, and SAP seems to chase this phenomenon like many superstitious people chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The much-quoted book "Algorithms and Data Structures" by the computer science professor Niklaus Wirth, who died about a year ago, already refers to the duality of data and processes. Looking at SAP's history from a distance, I see a bias in favor of business processes. End-to-end business and organizational processes have always been very important to SAP. Data has always been the fuel, but SAP has rarely managed data. I have never heard a discussion about the golden record at SAP.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to say that SAP has never cared about the well-being of ERP data. We still remember the trials and tribulations of the SAP Data Hub. Datasphere may be a marginal improvement, but even my peers do not see a fundamental improvement. Now, however, SAP wants to take a whole new approach to data management with the help of AI.

The Gen AI Hub is available on the Business Technology Platform. It is a powerful tool for connecting to AI services and LLMs. Many of our SAP Basis employees are familiar with its use and have created very interesting pilot projects in data cleansing and management in recent months. BTP is becoming a standard in the SAP ERP world and does not seem to be limited to the S/4 environment. On the contrary, BTP could be the basis for the previous ERP (ECC 6.0), the current one (S/4 Hana) and a future ERP. Perhaps this would also justify the quite solid SAP share price if SAP were to create a basis for AI and data management. Data is probably more important than processes, or do you disagree? I recommend reading Professor Niklaus Wirth's book to learn more.