The second death of BuByDe

Ingeniously off target

The idea for holistic standard business software as a SaaS offering from the SAP data center came from Hasso Plattner and his then SAP Chief Technology Officer Peter Zencke. He was the last visionary board member with both feet on the ground and his head way above the clouds at the same time. You could call Peter Zencke at any time and ask him for advice. He very often took the call personally without airs and graces. Today, it is common for board members to be surrounded by an impenetrable phalanx of assistants, who in turn make use of a phalanx of secretaries. Peter Zencke was different. He was a realist and a visionary at the same time. This combination created BuByDe. But SAP never really got the software conglomerate to fly.

DevOps ByDesign

When BuByDe was born, the topic of DevOps was only just emerging. In retrospect, however, the SAP disaster can be well outlined by the two poles of development and operation. Chief Technology Officer Zencke developed a fantastic ERP that was the first software in Germany to receive a quality certificate from TÜV. From the beginning, SAP had the whole ERP picture in mind, and with the experience gained from SAP R/3, logical and consistent data structures and algorithms emerged. In the end, BuByDe was a doctoral thesis in computer science.

No operational know-how

History repeats itself: With BuByDe, SAP already showed that the ERP world market leader had no knowledge regarding data center management. The performance of BuByDe from the Walldorf data center was lousy. Data protection and separation between BuByDe users were poor. The good idea suffered shipwreck in real life. A lot of improvements had to be made and at times sales were even discontinued.

BuByDe is dead

Hasso Plattner blamed the disaster on his Chief Technology Officer Peter Zencke, who left the company shortly afterwards without any words of thanks from the SAP co-founder. Naturally, Zencke was not solely responsible for the BuByDe disaster. In retrospect, it can be said that there was a lack of SaaS knowledge and a lack of knowledge about how to operate a SaaS solution operationally. Peter Zencke bears little blame here, as can be seen many years later with SuccessFactors. Here, too, there is a well thought-out and coherent solution that was almost driven to the wall by SAP because SaaS or cloud know-how was lacking. Back then, Hasso Plattner was already close to discontinuing BuByDe. Now he is getting his way in 2023.

SAP is not a cloud company

It takes a lot of knowledge to develop successful ERP solutions like R/3, BuByDe, Business Suite 7 and S/4. SAP has this business knowledge. And it takes a lot of knowledge to be successful as an outsourcer, hoster, SaaS and cloud provider. SAP does not have this knowledge. So BuByDe now has to die a second time. SAP was never able to help Peter Zencke's BuByDe achieve the success it deserved - a pity, with a little humility towards cloud computing it could have worked.