The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
In the current Spiegel report "The dark side of SAP" in issue 46/2021 on page 62, a gloomy, almost criminal picture of Gerd Oswald is sketched. Nothing criminal has been proven and the presumption of innocence applies! The SAP community could therefore go back to business as usual. The irony of the story, the almost satirical aspect of the Spiegel report, is the fact that a large part of the accusations against Gerd Oswald in turn benefit existing SAP customers. The league of extraordinary SAP gentlemen, Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Henning Kagermann and Gerd Oswald, seem to have acted in the interests of SAP's existing customers, the community.
The allegations in the Spiegel article can be summarized quickly: SAP is said to have enriched itself with knowledge at the expense of competitors in order to gain a market-leading position. There is a secret report on this, but it is obviously not worth the paper it is written on. The authors of this paper are probably excellent lawyers, but neither cyberneticists, computer scientists nor IT experts.
It is necessary to master the ancient Greek art of taxation in order to understand the operations of an ERP system. It is very difficult for computer scientists to obtain software patents; only very few IT experts succeed. It is even more difficult to understand the cybernetics, Steuerermannskunst, of an ERP system. And now SAP is alleged to have looked around at competitors and enriched itself - in other words, to have engaged in industrial espionage and infringed patents, thus stealing intellectual property. And all of this is said to have taken place over the past 20 years under the choreography of SAP's long-time CEO Gerd Oswald.
Oswald a superman for the SAP community, a villain for the rest of the IT world? As can be read in the Spiegel report, there have been SAP spin-offs, freelance employees and cooperations with universities to analyze and decode competitors' software. Computer scientists also call it reverse engineering when executable program code is decompiled, thus creating readable source code. Whether reverse engineering can be punishable must be doubted. According to Spiegel, Gerd Oswald was largely responsible for this decompilation.
However, other criteria should apply when evaluating Gerd Oswald's work: If SAP's existing customers transfer millions of euros to Walldorf every year, they have every right to expect the best software in the world. In this competitive situation, it must be permissible to look over the garden fence. No existing SAP customer will be happy if competitors' software is faster, more efficient and better - and Gerd Oswald has always delivered the best software. The IT community meets regularly at congresses and workshops to exchange ideas, concepts and visions. New products emerge from competitor observation and community research; Gerd Oswald has done little else. He had the IT market observed for SAP's existing customers. In all likelihood, VW CEO Herbert Diess has already sat in a Tesla, and his engineers have thoroughly disassembled that car - knowing what's going on in your neighbor's backyard is not a crime, it's smart prudence and intelligent foresight.
