Heaven or hell

SAP CEO McDermott's cloud prayers are reminiscent of religious fanaticism. By nature, he is a proselytizer and a driven man. He wants to free his existing customers from the shackles of their own data center and lead them to the promised land: Hana Enterprise Cloud, SAP Cloud Platform, SuccessFactors, etc.

Every path to the cloud seems legitimate to him. And if it's not the company's own cloud, then it may as well be a partner's kingdom of heaven. The success is manageable:

In May 2017, Bill McDermott was once again on the Sapphire stage in Orlando, USA. After repeatedly praising cloud computing in the highest terms, SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert was allowed to present cloud partner Google.

Although this partnership was only a few days old, SAP and Google already had a reference customer: Sovanta, the company of Professor Claus Heinrich, who was a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG from 1996 to 2009.

It is understandable that on the arduous and dangerous path to the kingdom of heaven, one first asks friends and colleagues if they are available as companions. Nine months later, however, the heavenly host should already have grown - but in SAP's Google Cloud, Arvato from Heidelberg is still found as the only reference for SAP's existing customers, who should, after all, follow this path.

As a proselytizer for a life in the cloud, Bill McDermott thus seems to have few arguments and little power of persuasion. Rather, he is driven by market forces to which SAP is helpless.

SAP has no scaling effects for its own cloud offering, which means either high prices and costs or low contribution margins. In terms of price and coverage, SAP therefore has no chance against Google, Amazon and Microsoft worldwide and against Telekom and Atos in Germany.

However, if the focus is not on the price-performance ratio, but on a possible IoT specialization, then again SAP has to admit defeat to Siemens, Bosch, PSI and others.

McDermott has now been chased out of heaven into hell by its own existing customers and the DSAG user association. Many SAP users want their HR/HCM system to remain securely stored in their own data center.

The path with the sensitive personnel data into SAP's cloud "SuccessFactors" obviously does not appear to the existing customers as a heavenly paradise, but as a descent into hell.

McDermott tried to persuade, threaten, obfuscate - it didn't work: In the end, the wishes of his own existing customers were his command. Even after 2025, there will be an SAP HCM system for the servers left on Earth.

HCM needs a stable foundation, solid ground under its feet, and is therefore best served in most cases in the company's own data center. So McDermott, the cloud zealot, saw the light:

HCM will not disappear into the mists of cloud computing or continue to mislead SAP's existing customers as the mirage that is "SuccessFactors."