SAP-Solution: Chefredakteur Blog

SAP is having a hard time with AI, as a recent interview with CEO Christian Klein in Handelsblatt shows. AI-assisted capture of incoming invoices is a standard process. ERP innovation should deliver more.

It's another case of deja vu. Instead of turning Leonardo into a digital platform of the future for Industry 4.0, SAP CEO Christian Klein is trying to lift his own existing customers into the cloud with his "Rise with SAP" idea.

SAP is no longer innovative. SAP is solid and predictable. SAP is working its way up the cloud computing ladder. SAP is looking for answers to the most important customer questions. With SAP, the existing customer can tackle the release upgrade to Hana and S/4 - and then?

The classic SAP existing customer knows the challenges of a relaunch and the SAP community knows the discussion about the added value of a release upgrade. Many projects are merely technical in nature so that the existing version does not fall out of maintenance.

What many computer users would like to see, a metaverse with limitless data and information exchange: A game piece or a purchased tool would be able to be used without limits in a metaverse. You must not tell an existing SAP customer this vision - he would probably have tears in his eyes.

Many roads lead to Rome, they say. For many years, the challenge for SAP legacy customers has been to harmonize, synchronize and orchestrate their data inventory. Now there are numerous paths to success for this task, but not all of them can be taken at the same time.

About twenty years ago, we had a cartoon in E-3 magazine that showed the ancient hero Sisyphus standing at the foot of the mountain with his stone to roll up forever, only to have it rumble back down from the top.

In the SAP R/3 era, the Customer Competence Center, CCC, was a great success. Certified existing SAP customers were able to save parts of the annual maintenance fee and thus cross-subsidize the CCC operation.

It is obvious that through a massive scaling effect, the public cloud brings significant added value for the providers and above all for the hyperscalers. SAP is also trying its hand at the public cloud - but so far only with very modest success, despite Rise with SAP.

The latest CEO survey from research and advisory firm Gartner found that CEOs and executives will think significantly differently about staffing, purpose, pricing and productivity in 2022 than they did before, particularly in relation to sustainability, workforce issues and inflation.

The official title of SAP's annual event is "Sapphire Now," but "Sapphire Vintage" would naturally be much more appropriate. Once again, the technology company Apple was on the Sapphire stage.

At the opening of the DSAG Technology Days 2022 in Düsseldorf, all speakers agreed that cloud computing will be an operating model of the future. However, a hybrid model - on-prem and cloud - will probably be the medium-term answer.