E3 Category: Editorial

SAP CEO Klein and CFO Asam are performing exceptionally well, as evidenced by the company's share price performance. However, outside of the financial implications, there is a sense of unease, uncertainty, and apprehension within the SAP community.

The SAP community of existing customers, partners and IT providers is emancipating itself and is getting better and better at achieving its goals without SAP. The question of the relevance of SAP itself resonates in the triad of the DSAG Annual Congress 2024 in Leipzig.

How can users differentiate themselves with standard business software? This raises the question of the cluster risk of the SAP S/4 Hana IT stack.

The Salzburg Festival is over, and Don Giovanni was an overwhelming success. While Don Giovanni dated 1,003 women in Spain, Christian Klein has around 10,000 developers worldwide.

CEO Christian Klein does his best to run SAP, but is that enough? Professor Hasso Plattner is no longer available to provide shock factor. Plattner is the risk and Klein is the sustainability, and risk and sustainability go hand in hand. What will become of SAP without one of the two elements?

The Hana database consolidates SAP's unique selling point. However, experts call this vendor lock-in. In the short term, SAP looks like a winner, but in the long run, SAP itself could end up in lock-in.

S/4, the successor to SAP Business Suite 7, is and will remain an on-prem system. SAP CEO Christian Klein is unlikely to achieve his cloud goals this way, which says nothing about the quality of S/4 Hana itself.

What is SAP's value proposition? There are few studies on this, but SAP is most probably not a technology company like Microsoft, Apple, Meta, or Google, or a bookseller like Amazon.

It was a dramatic time at SAP headquarters in Walldorf as many Supervisory Board members, Executive Board members and executives fought to keep their jobs. SAP Supervisory Board member and former Chairman-designate Punit Renjen was a danger that had to be averted.

The SAP Supervisory Board is a construction site

For SAP, there are very good reasons why the public cloud should be the future operating model. Users and the SAP community should have more autonomy to pursue their own interests.

Rarely before has the community been so surprised by SAP: the share price is reaching all-time highs, innovation is at rock bottom, and customers are angry and unsettled.