User's nightmare

WiWo editor Michael Kroker has recorded and documented everything correctly - only one sentence is wrong: "There are other ways to do it." The correct wording would be: "There was another way to do it!"

The turn of the year 2018/2019 marks a turning point in SAP's successful history. In the past, the SAP Executive Board was a colorful bunch of ingenious minds: There were researchers, controllers, programmers, service people, financial experts, visionaries, mathematicians.

There was once an SAP CEO who solved complex math puzzles in his spare time and could program in SAP's system language, Abap.

His name is Henning Kagermann, professor of physics. He was assisted by "IT craftsmen" with the best training and impeccable reputations: Gerd Oswald, Peter Zencke, Claus Heinrich, Shai Agassi, and so on. Back then, too, SAP implementations got out of hand, there were problems and escalations.

How often was the SAP jet launched and board members and technicians flew to Nestle in Switzerland, to Swarovski in Austria, etc.? But the whole SAP community was a successful family.

They helped each other, and if things didn't work out that way, they worked out differently. Henning Kagermann and Gerd Oswald never let a project go to waste. It went really well! Today, SAP's Executive Board consists almost entirely of salespeople with responsibility for revenue, and the chief salesman, Bill McDermott, looks more at the share price than at his existing customers.

SAP has become the nightmare of its long-time existing customers. In the E-3 cover story "Triple farewell" shows that the separation of the two top SAP managers, Bernd Leukert and Björn Goerke, is only the superficial turbulence of a deep system change and farewell to old values - yes, things used to be different.