All or nothing

These days, one wonders: What does SAP want? Does SAP want too much? The number of promises, announcements, projects, ideas, innovations seems to know no bounds.

Hardly a day goes by without new apps, collaborations and versions being announced. At the same time, the SAP community is becoming disgruntled because the software code is getting worse and worse.

There is a lot of development, but testing is done by the users - or at the expense of the users.

Apparently, SAP CEO Bill McDermott has issued the slogan to make the entire IT world happy and to conquer it. No area of IT is left out, although there is still enough need for repair in existing and ongoing projects.

Fiori, SAP's pretty and colorful user interface (UI), is not only spectacular, but also requires appropriate hardware on the PC: Never before have IT managers and users had to worry about the graphics card of an SAP workstation.

With Fiori, not only Hana is required in the back office, but also the PC hardware in the front office on the screen.

It's not that the SAP community can't afford better graphics cards now, but the organizational overhead hardly justifies the now moving and colorful interface.

A clerk wants to work efficiently and without errors. Animated business graphics may be allowed on the tablet and smartphone.

The curse of version 2:

There is a Hana 2, there is Fiori 2 and there is SolMan 7.2 - justified and welcome innovations from Walldorf. But what has obviously been forgotten in Walldorf is the necessary preparation, organization and training for existing customers, so that development may be fast, but implementation is hardly fast.

SAP wants everything and wants it now - only the SAP community has its own roadmap. There is an ever-widening gap between the theoretical ideas of a Bill McDermott and the practical limitations of an existing SAP customer.

Hana Enterprise Cloud and Hana Cloud Platform are slowly finding their way onto the roadmaps of existing customers, and already the two clouds are being replaced by an SAP cloud platform.

At the relevant SAP lectures and keynotes, the speakers themselves have great difficulty in always having the correct and current names ready - what was the name of the product yesterday and what is it called today?

The ERP group makes an extremely nervous impression and seems to want to overtake itself. Can this go well?

By its very nature, the Internet has sped up our lives considerably, but still the SAP community, with its responsibility for millions of users, has its own beat.

Even though SAP is pushing the pace more and more, the deadline of 2025 will not be met. Even after 2025, there will still be ERP systems with databases from Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

A singular Hana world is still a long way off - no matter how hectic and impatient Bill McDermott behaves. Less is more and quality is more important than quantity, which applies to Hana 2, Fiori 2 and many other SAP innovations.