The technology trap

Lumira is dead. The popularity of the on-premise BI and analytics tool can't be to blame. At SAP headquarters in Walldorf, the story goes that Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert is personally the gravedigger.

Urged by SAP CEO Bill McDermott to keep a focus on revenue and contribution margin, Leukert sacrificed further development of Lumira in favor of SAP Analytics Cloud.

McDermott is a brilliant salesman, and he keeps demanding even higher sales quotas. Bernd Leukert is a technician and has been with SAP since his first day on the job. In the past, he was able to successfully defend himself against McDermott's sales, revenue and contribution margin dictates.

Apparently, the SAP CEO has now broken him. Bernd Leukert will no longer find any allies on the Executive Board - all of them are trimmed to "sales". Perhaps Leukert will get some comfort from his mentor Gerd Oswald, who will be elected to the SAP Supervisory Board this May.

Naturally, there is a powerful institution and smart people who could have saved Lumira Designer from its final demise: The user association DSAG has the knowledge and the means to correct faulty developments at SAP on behalf of SAP's existing customers.

After R/3, R/3 Enterprise came at the insistence and request of the club. Something similar could have been achieved again. One remained astonishingly motionless. Only at the Technology Days 2018 did DSAG Technology Director Ralf Peters briefly mention the plight and praise his own association for a negotiated postponement of about 18 months.

Peters did not even mention another "construction site" at the 2018 Technology Days in Stuttgart: AnyDB. The S/4 project, which is so important for many existing SAP customers and was fiercely demanded by the user association just a few years ago, was not even worth a mention this year - even though there were over 2,000 technicians in the audience whose job it is also to ensure investment protection for the running ERP system.

Hana is an important and successful innovation - but it should also work differently. Thousands of SAP instances exist with MS SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle as well as Abap modifications. Investment protection for these stable and tested systems with an S/4 roadmap and AnyDB would be the least that the DSAG user association could do for its members.

Not against Hana, but for digital transformation! Investment protection based on S/4 with AnyDB would free up resources and licenses for important IoT tasks.

The digital transformation can no longer be reversed. CIOs need freely available budget resources for this. As long as SAP blocks the resources of its existing customers with an inflexible S/4 Hana roadmap, SAP's share price will rise, but the performance and efficiency of its existing customers will fall. This is where the DSAG association would be challenged to demand and enforce Hana alternatives for users.

But not even at a technical conference did DSAG Chief Technology Officer Ralf Peters manage to address the burning technology issues that SAP is completely innocent of: Meltdown and Spectre.

These security challenges are due to the CPU architecture, but are said to have a significant impact on database performance - so what now? Instead of an active and productive discussion with the SAP CTO Björn Goerke, who was present, the topic was not even hinted at.

CTO Goerke, asked by E-3 Magazine about possible effects for existing SAP customers, answers evasively. He is not aware of any effects or problems.