SAP technology, innovation and openness

SAP customer satisfaction not for existing customers

SAP has transformed itself into a cloud-only company in recent years, even if this fact is only clearly stated to financial analysts. The financial scene compares SAP with Oracle, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce and, of course, Meta and AWS. The buzzword "cloud" dominates everywhere. SAP CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam are skillfully playing with this expectation: their success proves them right. The SAP share price is rushing from one high to the next!

The German-language Handelsblatt analyzed: "Customer satisfaction" has been the motto of SAP CEO Christian Klein since he became sole CEO four and a half years ago. What initially paralyzed the course has developed into a model for success.

Anyone who tried to capture the mood at the 2024 annual congress of the German-speaking user group DSAG e. V. in Leipzig would have to come to a different conclusion. Most long-standing SAP customers feel they have been ripped off by the ERP world market leader's cloud strategy: The path to the SAP cloud "Rise with SAP" is riddled with numerous obstacles and stumbling blocks. The SAP community is now employing legions of lawyers to survive the S/4 Hana release change unscathed. A Rise contract by a lawyer from Munich at the DSAG annual congress was followed with astonishment by around 300 existing SAP customers in Leipzig. The technical and legal pitfalls of Rise-with-SAP are almost unmanageable.

Customer satisfaction? This satisfaction propagated by the Handelsblatt is almost only found among new SAP customers. However, anyone who is lucky enough to have the capital to start with a greenfield ERP system is in good hands in SAP's public cloud. It is more difficult for old and existing customers from the R/3 and ECC era with their system modifications, customizations and special requests.

SAP technology is based on Abap

Technology, i.e. a doctrine on IT and ERP technology, is currently not something you will find at SAP. However, SAP is investing heavily in cloud and AI technology. There is an unofficial competition with hyperscalers, who are publicly referred to as friends. Platform technologies such as SAP Business Technology Platform are not only available at SAP, but also at Microsoft Azure, AWS and in the Google Cloud.

However, the challenge for existing SAP customers is not the choice of a suitable cloud, but the digital transformation: a successful ERP system (SAP ERP/ECC 6.0) has to be transferred to the new S/4 Hana world with numerous modifications. Customer satisfaction is often sought in vain in this transformation process because it is expensive and often brings hardly any business or organizational benefits. Many CIOs are at a loss here if they demand the corresponding resources from the CFO without being able to provide evidence of genuine innovation. Many S/4 conversion projects are flawless, technical release changes.

Abap is not only SAP's own programming language, but also the core of ECC and S/4. There are many legacy issues in this area. The SAP community is only slowly learning how to transform business knowledge into the new S/4 world with new Abap concepts on SAP Business Technology Platform, among others.

SAP buys AI and refines

For unknown reasons, SAP has decided not to build up and apply its own knowledge in AI from the ground up, but to buy it in, as it did with process mining (Signavio) and enterprise architecture (LeanIX). Nevertheless, the German-language Handelsblatt analyzes: "Concerns that SAP, as the largest European software company, will lose touch with the rapid development of the artificial intelligence (AI) megatrend have evaporated. The company's self-declared strategy is not to develop basic AI technologies itself. Instead, SAP is integrating AI solutions already developed by tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM and the German Aleph Alpha into its own applications."

The extent to which existing SAP customers need AI in the form of ChatGPT has not yet been scientifically investigated. SAP is therefore trying out a strategy of small steps and is enhancing its own ERP system S/4 Hana in many areas with purchased AI technology. Ultimately, however, Christian Klein and Dominik Asam are probably concerned with the repeated use of the buzzwords cloud and AI, which obviously goes down very well on the stock market and in financial circles.

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