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The opinion of the SAP community, MAG 20-06, Satire: The Last

The unintelligent Christian

Christian Klein promotes the Intelligent Enterprise - a new ERP that doesn't stutter along dully, but is designed to make the user's work easier in an agile manner.
Peter M. Färbinger, E3 Magazine
July 9, 2020
Content:
The-Last-Satire
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This text has been automatically translated from German to English.

Naturally, artificial intelligence and machine learning must also produce an "Intelligent Enterprise" - at least SAP CEO Christian Klein firmly believes in this vision and utopia. Christian Klein is mistaken. He misjudges reality and is guided by arbitrary buzzwords that marketing produces at regular intervals.

Self-driving cars, learning robots and intelligent, self-healing algorithms are fascinating, but not universal. The progress in the field of artificial intelligence is enormous due to hardware and software innovations, but still very topic-specific and thus hardly generalizable. So what should an Intelligent Enterprise be?

SAP's existing customers are intelligent enough to realize that SAP has acted very unintelligently in recent years: Indiscriminately bought up different cloud app providers.

Hardly one cloud data model fits the other, and neither does ERP/ECC 6.0. The chaos, which was SAP's own fault, caused a maintenance extension for Suite 7 until 2027/2030.

This is a step that no one at SAP is taking voluntarily, but which is unavoidable due to the incompatibility of the new S/4 with the numerous SAP cloud offerings.

Now Christian Klein is trying the exit vision: Intelligent Enterprise. However, the intelligent SAP existing customer would need data harmonization, automation and an ERP strategy - not visions!

In his Sapphire preview keynote, Klein talks about "innovation and artificial intelligence" and reveals in a few words that he only has visions and no strategy.

The cartoon by Robert Platzgummer (1975 to 2016) was first published in June 2010. "If you have visions, you should see a doctor," said E-3 magazine, alluding to the plans of SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe at the time.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning could ultimately produce innovations in the hands of SAP's existing customers if SAP does its homework first: synchronize, harmonize, automate!

Intelligent users for a harmonized and automated ERP, that would be the realistic approach - but of course, in terms of marketing, it can't be sold quite as well on a Sapphire as the "Intelligent Enterprise".

While the unintelligent Christian loses himself in visions, his existing customers are fighting for survival: There is still a huge gap between the real existing ERP (Business Suite 7) and a possible maintenance extension beyond 2025.

SAP has still not solved and officially answered the "AnyDB" problem. Currently, the intelligent enterprise "Suite 7" has no licensed database platform after 2025, because SAP has not yet been able to present a contract extension with Microsoft, IBM and Oracle - no visions help here, a strategy is needed!

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Peter M. Färbinger, E3 Magazine

Peter M. Färbinger, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief E3 Magazine DE, US and ES (e3mag.com), B4Bmedia.net AG, Freilassing (DE), E-Mail: pmf@b4bmedia.net and Tel. +49(0)8654/77130-21


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