The love of SAP's existing customers
Zeus wants to conquer the beautiful Danae. His list already includes Alkmene, Europa, Leda and Semele. With a promise of much gold he wants to win Danae.
It almost seems as if the plan succeeds, in the end Danae falls in love with the wrong man, but right Midas and Zeus retreats to Olympus with all his gold.
SAP wants to conquer existing customers once again with new, bright ideas. R/3 was a tremendous success. ECC 6.0 from Walldorf has become the ERP standard worldwide.
Just as Zeus was not yet satisfied with Alkmene, Europa, Leda and Semele and was constantly on the lookout for new conquests, SAP does not want to be satisfied with ERP either.
In the Richard Strauss opera, it's Midas; at SAP, it's Hana. Everything that Midas touches turns to gold. Everything that happens through Hana happens in real time.
According to SAP, "I want to know everything, and I want to know it now" is the new gold standard. And SAP promises even more: in addition to an in-memory computing platform, mobile and cloud computing.
Zeus wants to conquer Danae by any means necessary, and Professor Hasso Plattner and his SAP are also trying to win over the existing customers once again. The love of Danae and the existing customers is worth a lot.
Danae emancipates herself and falls in love with the poor donkey driver Midas after he has been freed from his curse - everything he touches turns to gold - by Zeus.
This is how Richard Strauss tells the myth from ancient Greece. He himself described his opera as a "cheerful mythology in three acts.
For SAP's existing customers, the current act is anything but bright and cheerful: in-memory, mobile and cloud computing are coercive SAP moves, and no customer chooses Hana for the love of Hasso Plattner.
It is the necessary evil of dependence on the IT supplier. The love of existing customers is for the simple, reliable, adequate ERP system.
The digitization of the economy is challenge enough. IoT offers more than enough opportunities.
No existing SAP customer wants to be annoyed and distracted by tightened licensing rules, singular databases, overpriced cloud computing and more in these times.
SAP talks about open source and condemns existing customers to the Hana platform - without alternatives!
