SAP cleans up

Michael Kleinemeier wants to clean up his area with a new severance program - which is logical and consistent from the point of view of the official SAP strategy: Only open source - with Linux, Hadoop, OpenStack, etc. - and the company's own products should have a right to exist in a future SAP world.

Abap modifications and add-ons are consigned to purgatory. The task is to develop a pure ERP doctrine that can and must be based exclusively on the Hana database.

In this stringent and monocausal Hana-S/4 world, SAP needs fewer support staff: SAP Executive Board member Michael Kleinemeier cleans up!

In an ECC 6.0 world, the combinations of operating systems and databases are almost unmanageable. This open and colorful world is a major challenge for SAP. Every combination had to be evaluated and maintained. A daunting task for SAP support.

With two Linux versions and one database, much leaner support can be realized. SAP believes it can do without Unix, Windows, Oracle, SQL and DB2 experts. Of the nearly 15,000 service and support employees worldwide in Kleinemeier's area of responsibility, about 1,000 are to fall victim to a severance program.

This development is not without danger, because the outcome of SAP's bet on Hana and S/4 is still open. Uncertainty is very high, not only among us in the company, but also in the entire community.

An evaluation and compensation of all Z-functions, Abap modifications and add-ons will be a huge challenge and tie up many internal and external resources. At the moment, we are not equipped for this in terms of personnel, and we can only request external help within the framework of budgets that have yet to be released.

It's not the technology that worries me: SAP is definitely trying to support and accelerate the S/4 transformation process with tools, tips and tricks. It's the resources for converting and adapting the business processes and the enormous amount of work involved in quality assurance measures and test scenarios.

This is where we and the entire community lack experienced experts and dedicated consultants. I dared to experiment and offered my son a job with us in a transformation team.

Apart from the fact that he feels very little desire to work under his father, he revealed another insight to me: He works as an app programmer for Apple and a few startups in Berlin, among others. Even though he is interested in design thinking and open source, he would never voluntarily enter "old economy IT", even if it is based on one of the most advanced in-memory computing databases like Hana.

I almost got my son excited about a small project at our company: We want to experimentally explore the effort of transforming SQL-based apps into Hana Graph.

Naturally, he showed interest in Hana's native in-memory computing graph processing capability. This opens up a whole new IT world. Even though graph theory is an old computer science, the new SAP tools like Graph Viewer and Workspace are nevertheless a fascinating way to verify an alternative to SQL tables.

He hesitated briefly, but the prospect of getting stuck in the old economy was too great a risk for him. I then had a long chat with our HR director in the canteen about future workplace models and incentives - but that's another story.

No one can be blamed for the low motivation to join the SAP community. Chaos is growing and team spirit is breaking down. I don't want to report again about the attacks of SAP sales staff with the "weapon" of indirect use - NetWeaver Foundation for Third Party Applications.

Even the cloud computing propagated by SAP CEO Bill McDermott and his CFO Luka Mucic is becoming more and more of an unmanageable belly laugh.

Hana in the cloud - what is it? An application with Amazon EC2, MS Azure, GCP (Google Cloud Platform) or with SAP's cloud? Even my cloud experts have a hard time with a quick answer.

SAP is trying to dance on every high-water mark in order to force cloud success. I think that this strategy does not provide the hoped-for choice, but only increases the existing chaos.

Cloud computing is the logical step after consolidation, automation and virtualization. But without a strategy and roadmap, existing customers will hardly follow SAP.

Only CFO Luka Mucic tells us the revenue targets, but of course no technical solutions. Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert is silent here: Or does he himself not know what is best for his users - Google, Microsoft, Amazon or SAP?