In-house message: SAP's added value

Our focus is also on the necessary educational work for existing SAP customers and partners. Last month, a partner asked whether we were "really" serious about education.

We know that a look at this E-3 issue and especially the cover story of 13 pages on IT asset management must remove any doubt. More is not possible!

The next step would be a webinar and personal consultation. Thus, we see ourselves as an important part of the SAP community along a path that leads from information to consulting to a purchase decision.

The E-3 magazine as a mass medium is at the beginning of this successful path.

The added value that SAP was always able to offer was the holistic approach of more than satisfying the needs in the B2B scene with a standard business solution.

SAP is quite rightly the world market leader in the ERP sector. The concept of the five SAP founders has worked and has reached its peak so far with SAP Business Suite 7 on AnyDB.

The following concepts are correct, but the product strategy under SAP CEO Bill McDermott is dubious - SAP's added value is lost.

Until Suite 7 with AnyDB, SAP delivered an open, highly flexible system that could adapt to any requirement. The added value was freedom of choice. After that, Bill McDermott tried to reduce "diversity" to Hana, S/4 and cloud computing.

Complex solutions such as R/3 HR are now to be merged into a global, standardized SuccessFactors cloud. A mature and feature-rich product such as SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) is to be replaced by the Ariba cloud and IBM Watson.

However, the move from SAP's diversity of days gone by to a cloud-based SAP approach with Hana and S/4 does not seem to be working: Anyone who analyzed Sapphire closely this year could see that when it comes to cloud computing, SAP's singular offering - HCP and HEC - is far from a success with existing customers who demand diversity and openness.

SAP now has to cooperate with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google because its own cloud offering cannot find a market. And similarly, the singular Hana offering is fizzling out: First, SAP had to admit that the combination of Intel hardware and Hana software is not always the optimum and, if necessary, Hana on IBM Power is the much better choice.

Now even Professor Hasso Plattner had to admit at Sapphire 2017 that the Hana platform with Intel is far from sufficient for the coming Machine/Deep Learning. SAP will have to make use of the open source software Google TensorFlow and the hardware from Nvidia.

Obviously, the old diversity - albeit with different names - is back in the SAP community! The added value of a singular SAP world will not materialize. CEO Bill McDermott will have to correct his course if he wants to successfully reach 2025.