Record fever versus pioneering spirit

But Bill has miscalculated: A good economy and loyal existing customers are bringing SAP big revenue increases and satisfying profits, but Bill McDermott's cloud and Hana vision has no basis in fact.

Existing customers do not want to switch in a speed rush from R/3 to ERP 6.0 to S/7 with AnyDB, to SoH, Hana as well as to S/4 and ultimately end up on the SAP Cloud Platform - digital transformation requires a pioneering spirit:

New business processes and new organizational and operational structures must be invented, designed and customized. The real challenges lie beyond in-memory, mobile and cloud computing.

In the past, the big ate the small, then the fast overtook the slow. Today, innovative strength, intelligence and pioneering spirit count. A solid business education and efficient business processes replace the power of hardware and in-memory computing databases.

When Salesforce and Google join forces, no Hana speed rush will help. The cloud strategy of SAP CEO Bill McDermott and the record fever of former Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka (see illustration) are no longer up to date and will drive SAP into a dead end by 2020.

SAP Cloud Platform - after the confusion surrounding HEC and HCP - is one offering among many and has no unique selling point. With a cloud exit strategy and multi-cloud concepts, SAP's existing customers are better off and more agile - SAP's sword of Damocles "indirect use" alone can still throw a spanner in their works.

In reality, existing customers are switching to a cloud computing model without SAP being able to demonstrate significant growth on its own ERP cloud. And those who choose the "wrong" cloud offering are threatened with back license payments in the form of "indirect usage".

What SAP's existing customers need are affordable tools, platforms and solutions. The task areas are called IoT, machine learning, blockchain and open source. Pioneering spirit is required here.

Digital transformation is massively expanding the spectrum of ERP. Bots, IoT, AI and blockchain are representative of this:

• Blockchain is an almost infinite chain of certificates that reside on users' computers around the world - does an SAP's blockchain turn SAP's existing customers into indirect users?
• Will every IoT sensor and every M2M communication require a license from SAP Leonardo?
• Does a bot using Leonardo Machine Learning also need to purchase the SAP Professional User license at 3200 euros and pay AI maintenance fee in the future?

SAP's record fever leaves many questions unanswered and thus becomes a risk factor for existing customers, who are left behind in their pioneering spirit. The challenge is to climb the mountain of "digital transformation" and not to drive around it even faster in circles.