Fall of showbiz

It takes a long time and a lot of work before a finished magazine can go to print and be published on web PDF, iOS and Android.

I have always seen the ERP monopolist SAP in a similar position. Its core competence was ERP, CRM, SCM, HCM, etc. - in sum, the Business Suite including its own programming language Abap.

SAP stood for standard business software and was loved by customers for it. What was missing, the SAP partners supplemented.

The underpinnings - hardware, operating system, database and middleware - were again provided by other partners, so that a holistic ecosystem was available.

Then the fall from grace began, because SAP obviously wanted to dance at all the weddings at the same time - the show must go on?

The procedural language Abap has been trimmed to object-oriented: not only a disastrous but also an incomplete approach, because the Abap language construct was never intended for this. The "showbiz" Abap Objects will thus also die like the dinosaurs once did.

With Hana, not only the claim to an ERP database monopoly began, but also the construction of a platform for on premise and cloud computing. HCP, the Hana Cloud Platform, is a disaster: There is no backup concept for the data, and how a user will ever bring his IoT data back down to earth is also still an open question.

The HCP programming model is also based on "Eclipse" - however, SAP's version differs from the well-known open source version, which requires considerable training time!

Hana as a database and platform is the perfect vendor lock-in: more and more functions are to be realized in the DB platform and queried via Fiori/HTML5 - so that Abap can be eliminated, see above.

And in addition to the "showbiz" Linux, Hana and Fiori, SAP rolled a suitcase with a Bluetooth chip onto the stage for the Sapphire customer event, so that travelers can find their luggage via smartphone.

Sensors are sewn into the jerseys of soccer players, which are analyzed in real time via Hana. In the future, SAP wants to sell not only Big Data with Hana and Hadoop, but also anonymized data, so that a restaurant has a movement profile of its guests.

Similar "social media profiles" are already being created at Burberry with Hana. Showbiz to the end!

• In sum, interesting experiments, but where is the core competence?
• How is trust in the ERP monopolist supposed to grow if it uses every available opportunity to put on a show?
• Why doesn't SAP do its homework?
• S/4 Finance and Logistics are not stringently programmed ERP applications, but merely add-ons to SoH (Business Suite 7 on Hana). Should the entire S/4 become an S/7 add-on?
• Is it show or ERP?

Core competence in ERP and magazine journalism are in demand!