Words, they no longer fit!

My wife reads the first lines of my column and looks critically: "Leave poor Doctor Faust alone." But I have to quote Goethe because nothing else helps me against SAP - or is laughter allowed during sex?

The best wife in the world didn't expect this question! "Please, what should be allowed?" she blurts back at me skeptically. "Yes, you heard right, Klaus Boldt, editor-in-chief of the German business magazine Bilanz, asked McDermott in Walldorf whether it was allowed to laugh during sex."

My wife is very open-minded about many things, but what this lifestyle question has to do with SAP and an interview in a business magazine is incomprehensible to her. "I hope your friend Färbinger doesn't take it as an example," was her final comment.

I bought the business magazine Bilanz at the airport in Frankfurt on my business trip to Turin: In the interview, editor-in-chief Boldt asks our SAP CEO 137 questions - including: "Bill, would you like to be your wife?"

However, one of the 136 answers really got through to me. (Refusing to answer "What do you love most about home?" was Bill McDermott.) But he says, "Our pace of innovation is just incredible, I've never seen anything like it."

Speed of innovation at SAP? Yes, McDermott is absolutely right about this. Never before in the forty-year history of SAP have so many new products seen the light of day in such a short period of time - a small side effect: Existing customers do not receive finished, tested products, but half-finished goods that first have to be painstakingly unraveled and tested.

Our E-3 editor-in-chief Färbinger has reported on the Hana fiasco several times. The transition from Hana 1 to Hana 2 is a game of chance, with the rules of the game changing every two weeks.

As Group CIO, I no longer get my hands dirty with this, but I rush from one escalation meeting to the next and try to calm the angry tempers, because our operational business must be safeguarded in any case - even if SAP is currently throwing a massive beating between our legs.

"Usually, when people just hear words, they think there must be something to think about." I don't think McDermott was thinking anything in his balance sheet interview when he said, "Our pace of innovation is just incredible, I've never seen anything like it."

Unfortunately, editor-in-chief Boldt did not inquire, but described himself as a supplier of words - he is probably aware that this interview is not a journalistic text.

Nevertheless, one answer seems interesting for the SAP community. Klaus Boldt asked Bill McDermott, "Your most successful decision at SAP?" And the latter answered:

"I think that was in my early days as co-CEO in 2010. It took an entrepreneurial vision to focus on improving the world and people's lives.

And I focused not only on the company's great tradition and past, but asked myself what the important issues of the 21st century will be and how we can address them in a timely manner."

Run simple - but "Anyone who has visions should go to the doctor," Helmut Schmidt already said in Der Spiegel about Willy Brandt's visions in the 1980 Bundestag election campaign.

The summer was not characterized by continuous work, but one crisis meeting followed the next: indirect use, SoH with Hana 2 and long-time suppliers running in the wrong direction.

HP is going down the wrong path with The Machine: Due to presumed high data volumes, the focus is on memory-driven computing. We have the concept that the millions of sensor data (IoT) must never get into the ERP/MRP.

The answer is edge computing. Where the sensors are, there are also specialized processors and algorithms that sort out and package the data. HP focuses on the quantitative challenges and neglects the qualitative work.