The humble SAP

In the end, everything fits together well again: SAP is increasing the cloud subscription and maintenance fee by 3.3 percent, and it is not with this announcement that SAP CEO Christian Klein faces the DSAG members at the annual congress in Leipzig, but sends Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig into the lion's den.

SAP shares its success with the SAP community, but you do it according to your own rules - SAP shares fairly and everyone gets a piece of the pie, see illustration with ex-SAP CEO Professor Henning Kagermann. Christian Klein has to please many groups over and over again: Shareholders, partners, existing customers, employees, analysts and journalists. The share price is supposed to rise, but the prices for cloud, on-prem licenses and maintenance are supposed to fall. It remains a squaring of the circle.

There is an exit strategy that no one at SAP wants to hear about: more modesty, more openness, more transparency, more partnership, and more communication. If SAP were to be more modest, then the ECC maintenance fee should drop. ECC is a discontinued model. ECC is hardly developed any further, support is standardized and largely automated. With modern IT tools, the challenges should be done with half the effort compared to five years ago - which could mean that the maintenance fee does not increase by 3.3 percent, but decreases by five percent per year, right?

It is euphemistic, mitigating or obfuscating when the headline says: humble SAP. Nor is SAP open, transparent or communicative: the new "invitation-only" format of the Sapphire in-house exhibition is a capitulation to this age. Deutsche Telekom is turning the whole of Cologne into a festival site to showcase the future. It organizes open panel discussions and street festivals, while SAP hides and isolates itself, but philosophizes about cloud and open source.

SAP not only needs a successor for Hana and S/4, but also a new "storytelling" for shareholders and existing customers. When it comes to business, organizational, licensing and technical roadmaps, SAP CEO Christian Klein is very modest - here in the truest sense of the word: What is SAP planning for beyond 2025 and 2030? By 2040, there will be support for S/4, which is no longer up to date - the rest is off the air. SAP claims a lot (see illustration) and gives very little. Accordingly, the vast majority of SAP statements belong in the realm of euphemism - a euphemism, a curse word, cover word or dressing up. It is a linguistic expression that euphemizes, mitigates, or obfuscates a person, group of persons, object, or circumstance. How does the SAP community talk about SAP at the DSAG Annual Congress in Leipzig?