SAP Roadmaps: Chaos days in Walldorf

Cloud computing is an IT operating state that can make sense in some cases. Cloud computing, Hana, S/4 and many others from the SAP universe are valuable tools, but not solutions.

We as CIOs in the SAP community and our C-level colleagues pride ourselves on the fact that we are masters of complex systems, companies and structures, and that we create jobs and company profits with this complexity - and then SAP CEO Bill McDermott comes along and tells us: Run simple!

My son was visiting and said that SAP CEO Bill McDermott's saying "Run simple" was pretty cool. It would be right in line with the current situation in life: My son works at Apple.

He works dedicatedly and successfully, but none of his projects last longer than six months. He doesn't own a car and pays a lot of attention to work-life balance. He is happy with his girlfriend and his life runs really simple and content.

And in talking with him, I ask if maybe Bill McDermott is trying to sell us a way of life and not Hana with S/4 attached.

We have many working students and successful university graduates in a wide range of IT teams, and I find my son's attitude to life reflected in the young employees: Run simple!

My daughter is younger than her brother and much more ambitious. She can't do much with the simple work-life balance - so there are always engaging discussions at the Sunday dinners we rarely have together.

My daughter is fluent in four languages and loves a challenge - I would say mastery of complexity and global, sustainable implementation.

But Walldorf seems to be infected by Bill McDermott's run-simple bacillus. We "old" CIOs in the SAP community pride ourselves on mastering complexity.

We are used to constructing sound roadmaps for five years and more with our technical staff.

Now I have to recognize that SAP has become "agile". What counts is the colorful world of tomorrow. What happens the day after tomorrow doesn't seem to interest anyone.

The current solution competence of the young developers is limited to a few apps in connection with the Hana Cloud Platform. For a long time, the software code from Walldorf has not been as bad, sloppy and incomplete as it is at the moment.

And the end users don't even get this bad code for free! Everything has to be licensed and paid for, even SAP partners developing in the HCP have to pay developer licenses for it. Regardless of how much code in the HCP is actually based on open source projects.

These are the chaos days in Walldorf, when half-finished software is delivered to existing customers for verification at a charge.

At our annual kick-off with the analysts from Gartner and our Group CIOs, the predicament in Walldorf and the continued determination to "run simple" were naturally important topics.

We also discussed the development of cloud computing in general and the importance and technology of HCP in particular.

Viewed holistically, the lack of infrastructure at SAP is a weak point. We hear from the group that data centers are being built and cloud computing is being leased from IBM - but is that sufficient for a global IoT and M2M?

The news that SAP is now using the services of Cloudflare is therefore not very reassuring. Cloudflare is a global provider with over 100 data centers and sophisticated WAN technology, but according to rumors it rents its network to really anyone - including subversive elements?

Another point of discussion with the experts from Gartner was the findings of fellow analysts from IDC, who predicted a bright pink future for HEC and HCP at SAP Fkom in Barcelona.

Where the IDC colleagues fished out these optimistic figures for SAP was not clear to the Gartner analysts either.

Already in the coming years, SAP wants to generate more revenue with cloud subscriptions and licenses than "on-premise".

Regionally in the U.S. and Asia, perhaps - but among my CIO colleagues in Europe, that is inconceivable. The DSAG figures from the latest investment survey also tend to show the opposite: cloud computing will still grow strongly in quantitative terms, but in qualitative terms it will move in the direction of on-premise, virtualization and private cloud - SAP licenses will remain in the company's own portfolio and will be purchased as before.

Which, of course, does not argue against using the company's own licenses in the Azure, IBM and AWS clouds. For SAP itself, the IDC prophecy in Barcelona was like balm for the cloud wounds.

SuccessFactors is still a disaster and SAP's other cloud services are only growing quantitatively. I expect SAP to massively revise its cloud strategy shortly before 2020, as HP has done in the past.

Cloud is a tool, but not a solution and not an IT strategy!