The inner world of the outer world of the inner world
It's an old adage: To distract yourself from internal problems, turn your attention to external enemies and start attacking them. Currently, Salesforce is McDermott's favorite target.
It all started this year at Sapphire in Orlando, when Bill McDermott - like the magician pulling the rabbit out of the top hat - promised the assembled existing customers a new CRM system, to their great surprise.
However, while the rabbit is a real one with good magicians and even becomes a tiger or lion with very good magicians, it remains only hot air and a vague promise with McDermott. The new CRM suite goes by the name of C/4 and is currently a very large construction site.
With C/4 and Hana, Bill McDermott wants to bring CRM champion Salesforce to its knees: A few years ago, the Swiss e-commerce system Hybris was acquired for this purpose, followed at the beginning of this year by the CPQ tool Callidus (Configure Price Quote), and now the American software company Qualtrics, which offers analyses and datability of all e-commerce channels including the verification of competitors and their public data as well as the e-mail traffic of the company's own employees (the works council sends its regards), was purchased for a staggering seven billion euros.
Hybris, Callidus, and Qualtrics, along with a collaboration with Adobe and Microsoft, are expected to eventually grow into a CRM suite for customer experience and experience management.
It can already be predicted that it will remain a blunt weapon against Salesforce. With numerous interfaces into the ERP, Abap modifications and avoidance of "indirect" use, SAP's new CRM will become the first choice for some existing customers and will also function adequately after many years of customizing - but market success looks different!
SAP is and remains a technically demanding and complex IT system. This was never a particular challenge for the five SAP founders, and ex-SAP CEO Professor Henning Kagermann is also proficient in Abap programming and loves mathematics, so he never had any problems with ERP complexity.
Bill McDermott, on the other hand, is a highly trained salesman - technology is a means to an end, and that end has been defined as tripling the stock price.
For McDermott, marrying three different technologies, Hybris, Callidus and Qualtrics, based on more than 40 years of ERP tradition with a database that is not yet mature does not seem like a problem.
Not everyone speaks Abap and the Hana Execution Engine (HEX) is still not free of anomalies: Nobody expects a complex SQL database with in-memory computing components to achieve market maturity and sufficient ERP stability within a few years - only at SAP did they believe they could bring about this IT miracle!
Now the SAP technicians have once again been proven wrong: A Hana Execution Engine bug ensures that the entire available memory is consumed - up to the limit - without taking the allocation limit into account:
As a result, the Linux operating system has no more room to breathe and goes down the drain. The lights go out at Hana! (The HEX bug has been fixed in the meantime.) Hybris, Callidus and Qualtrics - welcome to the brave new world of in-memory computing.
But because the outside world is also an inside world, chief salesman Bill McDermott has now reorganized the board and this year not only acquired Callidus and Qualtrics as an external demonstration of power, but internally ousted chief technology officer Bernd Leukert.
His successor is largely unknown in the SAP community: Jürgen Müller was most recently CIO at SAP and is now moving to the SAP Executive Board as head of technology. Intimate connoisseurs of the scene suspect that this personnel rochade also took place with the help of Professor Hasso Plattner; after all, Jürgen Müller studied successfully at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam.
Bernd Leukert will remain on the Executive Board and will be responsible for the SAP service area next year together with fellow Executive Board member Michael Kleinemeier. Kleinemeier will retire from the Executive Board at the end of 2019 for age reasons.
Whether Bill McDermott had a happy hand in all internal and external decisions this year remains to be seen: merging Hybris, Callidus and Qualtrics into C/4 is a Herculean task.
Björn Goerke as Bernd Leukert's successor would have been more logical, more consistent and much more in line with the SAP community. Goerke is considered a superstar among SAP mentors!
But Jürgen Müller seems to have the better internal lobbying. Whether Bernd Leukert has stumbled across the Hana anomalies, Analytics in the cloud or Abap on the SCP cannot be determined. For the SAP community, however, SAP's inner world of the outer world of the inner world remains a Walldorf mystery.
The inner world of the outer world of the inner world is one of Peter Handke's most commercially successful books. It was published on March 5, 1969.
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1 comment
Christian Podiwinsky
Man muss keine großartigen Marktanalysen zu machen: 80 % und mehr der klassischen SAP-ERP-Kunden haben sich für SAP entscheiden, weil es multifunktionale, integrierte, in sehr vielen Branchen weltweit bewährte und auch für den gehobenen Mittelstand sehr nutzvolle betriebswirtschaftliche Software bietet, die Kern-Prozesse dieser Unternehmen inklusive Planung und mitlaufenden, aktiven Controlling am besten unterstützt. Dafür zahlten sie einen höheren Lizenzpreis und jedes Jahr einen nicht unerheblich höheren Wartungsvertrag als für Konkurrenzprodukte. Die Erwartungshaltung ist, dass diese Mittel zu einem beträchtlichen Anteil dazu verwendet werden, um die bestehenden ERP-Funktionen laufend auszubauen, zu verfeinern und durch state-of-the-art Produkte / Funktionen, die in gewohnter Weise sich nahtlos in die bestehenden Softwaremodule integrieren lassen, auszubauen. Diese Kunden sind auch gewohnt, dass SAP für die Neuerungen ein entsprechend detailliertes Schulungsprogramm, sehr praxisnah agierende Berater und genauso umfangreiche Anwender, Customizing- und Systemdokumentationen zu Verfügung stellt, wie es bei den klassischen ERP-Produkte der Vergangenheit Usus war.
Genau die gleichen Kunden werden aber wenig Verständnis haben, wenn ihre Lizenz-und Wartungsbeiträge dazu verwendet werden, um sündteure Unternehmen (oft zu einem überhöhten Marktpreis ?) zuzukaufen, deren Software weder den Keybedürfnissen bezüglich sinnvoller ERP-Erweiterungen und schon gar nicht den gewohnten Ausprägungen bezüglich technologisch-funktionellen Integration, Ausbildung, Beratung, Dokumentation entsprechen,
Wenn jetzt noch 4.000 SAP-Mitarbeiter vorzeitig das Unternehmen verlassen werden , ist zu befürchten, dass dies vor allem “alte Hasen” im ERP-Bereich sind, die bestenfalls durch irgendwelche Jungspunde für Cloudvertrieb ersetzt werden.
Ich bin gespannt, wann SAP-Anwender dies nicht nur kritisch betrachten, sondern auch Konsequenzen setzen und nicht mehr wie früher eher ungeschaut SAP-Produkte kaufen und im schlimmstenfalls anlässlich einer HANA-Umstellung in Frage stellen, um die “next ERP-generation” unbedingt SAP sein muss oder ob sich da nicht Alternativprodukte anbieten.