Doing nothing is not an option

It is a paradoxical picture: SAP appears unchanged. There is programming, customizing and consulting. There are meetings, online events and a 50th anniversary celebration in the SAP Arena in Mannheim with almost 1,000 guests and many anecdotes from the past. There is a Sapphire in Munich with Invitation-only and naturally without analysts and journalists. Everything appears as in previous years.

However, a closer analysis shows that nothing is moving at SAP: The Group appears frozen, motionless and rigid. No one is really doing anything. Nothing significant, strategic or visionary is happening. The only message for the future is: We will keep S/4 in maintenance until 2040! Nothing else is happening at SAP and very little is happening in the SAP partner landscape - but doing nothing is not an option! One example: The popular and successful SolMan needs a successor for the cloud computing age. Theoretically, ILM, Information Lifecycle Management, could inherit SolMan, but there has been no further development for three years. ILM is frozen, motionless and rigid. There are SAP partners waiting for a resurrection and revival, and meanwhile they are doing nothing, but doing nothing is not an option. There is one SAP partner that has implemented an ILM alternative and will roll it out to the SAP community early next year.

Apparently, a paralysis is emanating from SAP that has now gripped large parts of the SAP partner community. It seems like a group dynamic scenario: Who blinks first? Who communicates first? Who does the first face-to-face event? Who develops a post-pandemic brand message first? Or do we no longer need to communicate with each other? Are visions and storytelling just mirages and basically everything is fine anyway?

The writing colleagues at WiWo have calculated that SAP CEO Christian Klein has destroyed around 60 billion in stock market value over the past two years. If the DAX had developed similarly to the SAP action, the index would currently stand at around 8,500 points. The alarm bells should be ringing 24/7 at SAP itself and in the partner community. This crisis has already reached SAP's existing customers. They are reacting and verifying new IT sources because users know that doing nothing is not an option.

It seems completely puzzling the calm and indifference with which Christian Klein and many managing directors of SAP partner companies are currently acting. While many existing SAP customers are looking beyond their familiar horizons to find interesting logistics, IoT, AI and HR offerings - for the latter, see this issue's cover story - doing nothing seems a plausible option for many members of the SAP community.

SAP's existing customers will remain SAP's existing customers, but the inaction of SAP and some partners will force them to reduce the share of SAP-based solutions - to the benefit of ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, IBM and AWS. From the edges, SAP territory is being eroded. Many functions that used to be delivered very naturally by SAP will come from competitors in the future. The best-known areas for this are Industry 4.0, logistics and artificial intelligence. Now SAP is paying the price for many years of doing nothing.