Save yourself who can

Luka Mucic had to inject 200 million euros to satisfy all SAP departures and severance requests. Obviously, many employees do not want to continue serving under a CEO Bill McDermott. To be fair, it should also be emphasized that in such "waves of layoffs" the Group is extremely fair and generous.

If you ask around Walldorf, you'll hear it again and again: I couldn't refuse the SAP offer, it's extremely attractive! Many experts are currently on the move, half leaving Walldorf and half embarking on a new IT adventure. What stands out:

Hardly anyone wants to or will leave the SAP community! The interest in "SAP" seems to be unbroken, but obviously nobody wants to work there anymore.

There have been numerous and prominent departures in recent months: Björn Goerke, Bernd Leukert and Rob Enslin (E-3 Magazine reported).

Now another top executive is leaving the ERP world market leader, but will remain in the SAP community: Marcell Vollmer, most recently Chief Digital Officer at SAP Ariba and with SAP for a total of around 20 years, is leaving for Munich-based unicorn Celonis.

I got to know Celonis many years ago as a very small start-up at an innovation event at SAP in Potsdam. Since then, Celonis' global success has almost exploded and today the company is valued at over a billion dollars.

Thus a sensible and innovative career move for Marcell Vollmer.
The SAP community is facing a generational shift, with hyperscalers replacing many on-prem data centers, low-code/no-code development platforms replacing Abap, machine learning at Google, IoT at Microsoft, Bosch and Siemens replacing SAP Leonardo, Hana replacing DB2, Oracle and SQL Server, and Celonis replacing Aris from IDS Scheer, see also E-3 cover story May 2019:

From Aris to Digital Twin, a story about IT transformation and the new market leaders like Celonis.

This time, E-3 Magazine is also benefiting from the upheaval and SAP's "wave of layoffs". With this issue, we welcome a new author: Werner Dähn was an SAP employee until recently.

He accepted the very fair severance offer and will in future offer his SAP knowledge as a consultant to existing customers, but on the side with a lot of commitment to write for the E-3 magazine on the topics of Big Data, Smart Data Integration, perhaps also a commentary on the SAP Data Hub and of course about Hana.

E-3 author and B4Bmedia.net AG Supervisory Board member Michael Kramer has phased out his e-commerce column and starts this issue with a motivational text on digital transformation.

"The Soul of a New Machine" is what we call this interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein, in reference to the book by Pulitzer Prize winner (1982) Tracy Kidder.