SAP proliferation

After a few years, R/3 or later ECC 6.0 was customized. But then the following happened: The CIO became increasingly skeptical about the price/performance ratio of SAP software. He evaluated suitable alternatives and innovative add-ons with SAP partners. The SAP community remained the home, the SAP partner the primary contact, ERP/ECC 6.0 was and remains the basic system, but innovative enhancements in the sense of digital transformation are increasingly succeeding with non-SAP products.

Thus, SAP sales targeted the business departments and bypassed the CIO. The SAP board bought new applications indiscriminately - with a preference for cloud apps. The result was a proliferation both among SAP's existing customers and at SAP itself.

Today, the CIO is "fighting" on two fronts: Internally, he has to consolidate the numerous IT systems and cloud apps of the business departments, and in the SAP universe, he is driven by the release change to a Hana-only and multi-app architecture - in the cloud and on-prem. Now SAP's existing customers and SAP itself have to watch how they jointly get a grip on the growing complexity. SAP has not succeeded in reducing the horizontal and vertical sprawl in recent months. A lot of work awaits the three musketeers on the SAP Executive Board: Christian Klein, Jürgen Müller and Thomas Saueressig.