Chief Digital Officer

I was suspicious of the whole thing right from the start: SAP needs a CDO? And SAP can't find anyone better than its own CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). Let's give the man credit: At our company, a career from CMO to CDO would not be possible.

So I was all the more interested to read the interview of SAP CDO Jonathan Becher on handelsblatt.com - why do I never find such interviews in E-3 magazine?

The SAP CDO has ambitious goals: He thinks that paper and sales representatives belong to an old, analog world. If I interpret the interview correctly, CDO Becher wants to do away with SAP sales reps and have existing customers pay the maintenance fee by credit card.

This fits in with the general Walldorf picture: employees are already being made redundant there - not suddenly and spectacularly, but with long transitional periods. Selected employees are allowed to take early retirement with full pay for up to three years.

Jonathan Becher is particularly proud of his credit card payment system for SAP cloud services. Where does this man live? According to his own information, in Palo Alto, USA. However, it is not really possible to determine where he is located intellectually.

In any case, payment by credit card is not a real cloud computing innovation - perhaps in Walldorf?

What I liked best was this statement:

"I lead an orchestra of experts, so to speak, who have to work together on an unfamiliar piece called digitization. My job is to prevent discord."

Digital Transformation is not an unknown piece, but a reality for every SAP CIO. Why did we invest in Hana, because we are aware of Digital Transformation. He also doesn't really seem to be succeeding with the discords: The mood in Walldorf is catastrophic.

How do you pack 600 million tons of freight into a box that can only hold 216 million? I recently read this question on Spiegel Online, with an SAP logo underneath - so it was an advertising banner.

I was lucky: A few days later, we had an executive meeting in St. Leon-Rot and I asked all the SAP colleagues present this question - no one knew the answer, but everyone was ranting about SAP Marketing, based in faraway New York City.

One of my SAP golf partners then took me aside and said, "Hana should fix it, but be glad you weren't in Orlando at Sapphire, it was full of such intelligent questions this year.

I'm worried about SAP: With managers like CDO Becher and a marketing that is out for cheap effects on the one hand; layoffs, poor numbers for ECC 6.0 on Hana, teething problems with S/4, an impatient supervisory board chairman and extremely high revenue targets on the other; this is not how I know the Walldorf-based company.

There is only one topic at our SAP regulars' table: license measurement and SAP's attempts to sell even more licenses. The price list from the first quarter is clearly aimed at squeezing even more money out of existing customers with modified contracts.

SAP seems to be willing to use any means. The analysts at Gartner are sometimes true prophets! Back in the fall of 2013, they wrote a note pointing out the value of SAP legacy contracts.

Analysts have never been more right than this time. The CIOs at our regulars' table consider the license measurement toolset developed at SAP customer Daimler to be particularly perfidious. I

nce I heard about it from my CCC leader, who participated in the DSAG webinar License Measurement Tool in mid-March. The lever to break open the oyster is clever: SAP pretends to want to support the existing customer in the rights management and assignment of their users - not without praising the new tool to the skies and also charging license fees for it, although the piece of software is not even SolMan-compatible.

SAP's license measurement tool is touted as a management tool and authorization tool for users and SAP modules. In reality, it is a snooping program to tell SAP who is using which modules, what authorization concepts and roles exist, and whether it all matches the license management and measurement.

It can be assumed that no later than three months after customizing the license measurement tool, the SAP VB will be at the door with a license invoice.

My Corporate-CCC leader organized the link to the DSAG webinar for me, after logging in you will find the recording plus two "helpful" PDFs: CDP - Corporate License Measurement, the documentation for the DSAG webinar by Eckhard Lehrer, SAP Custom Development Sales (March, 2015) and Automating SAP License Measurement, also by Eckhard Lehrer (a bit older from May 2013, Confidential).

As far as I understand it, it is a must-read for every CCC manager as well as legal counsel and in-house counsel. With this "summer reading" I say goodbye until September and wish you relaxing vacations.

noname@pe3.greatsolution.dev