Guinea pig

McDermott acknowledged in a July conference call that existing S/4 customers are, by their very nature, early adopters - you're just at the beginning of this massive, digital transformation!

The reverse conclusion to Bill McDermott's euphoric S/4 growth forecast is sobering: what the SAP CEO called early adopters are, in lived ERP practice, the guinea pigs of an unfinished ERP suite.

This picture is confirmed by numerous experts from the SAP community: SAP is developing new software and using existing customers as a test lab. McDermott is absolutely right about innovation.

Never before in SAP's forty-year history have so many new products seen the light of day in such a short time - a small side effect: existing customers do not receive finished, tested products, but half-finished goods that first have to be laboriously unraveled and tested.

The fact is that the early adopters hit the wall hard with Hana 1 and SAP does not even negate this fact: McDermott thus rightly sees enormous potential still ahead.

If existing customers had known that they were buying a kindergarten with Hana and S/4 and not fully trained academics, there would be fewer system crashes at the moment.