The way is the goal

It's exasperating: outside the door, life is flowing by fast and it feels like it's getting faster and faster thanks to the Internet. SAP's answer: ever new tricks and promises like virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and, of course, SolMan.

The SolMan roadmap becomes more and more dangerous and uncertain, so that only humor helps: The way is the goal!

Much too late last year, SAP emphatically and demonstrably made its existing customers aware of the new version 7.2.

SAP started the ramp-up cycle for the new SolMan 7.2 much too late last year.

Much too late this year, SAP incorporated the findings from the ramp-up into the new version.

The result:

A stable, mature and tested SolMan 7.2 will not be available until May of this year with SPS 5 - existing customers will then have exactly seven months for customizing and system conversion.

Things are getting tight and many CCoE leaders already see the Christmas peace in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, SAP is raving about SolMan 7.2's new features, Hana and S/4 capabilities, and considers itself well on its way. But it will end in disaster: It will be a balancing act for existing customers and SAP, and only with great effort, skill and prudence will the goal be reached in time.

Cloud computing: The journey is the destination!

SAP's dithering is hardly reassuring for existing SAP customers. SAP's cloud offering has been restructured yet again - the new SAP Cloud is to grow out of Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and Hana Cloud Platform (HCP). Much more important on this cloud path into the future would be a verified exit strategy.

A leading SAP partner told E-3 Magazine that he cannot recommend anyone move to SAP's cloud until there is an official and documented exit strategy.

The journey is the destination and the SAP community is still waiting for final results regarding Hana Predictive Analysis Library (PAL).

What happened to the graph database that was supposed to be one of the many Hana Engines? The nodes and edges of a graph can be used much better for structuring data than SQL tables in some cases.

PAL contains functions for the construction of neural networks, as they are used in machine learning. If you look for concrete results and products, the path ends in a dead end.

Many years ago, Professor Hasso Plattner and his then Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka proclaimed that the Hana in-memory computing database would continue to develop in an evolutionary manner - which would mean that version numbers would be out of the question.

Hana is Hana!

All upgrades and improvements will be compatible with the previous versions. There will be no release changes!

Last year at SAP TechEd in Barcelona, the current Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert presented the product "Hana 2". Somewhere SAP seems to have lost its way and developed an alternative - right?

Now the path to the goal is called Hana 2. The community is amazed and wonders how long SAP can continue to walk this tightrope.