Sour vinegar icing

Nothing new in Walldorf! As early as 2005, they tried to keep up appearances and conceal the R/3 conglomerate with sugar icing. An Enterprise Service Architecture was supposed to bring order to the SAP landscape and consolidate the operation of the various R/3 modules.

The then SAP CEO, Professor Henning Kagermann, never tired of talking about the new sugar-sweet and blooming landscapes in which SAP's existing customers were to move in the future - along uniform, standardized and secure paths.

Naturally, things turned out differently: The first disaster was mySAP ERP 2004 with ECC 5.0 and SAP Web AS (Application Server) 6.40 - Dear board members, Thomas Saueressig, Jürgen Müller and Christian Klein, do you remember? A little later, ERP/ECC 6.0 as the core of SAP Business Suite 7 gave stressed existing customers some breathing space, which has now been extended to 2030: Never change a running system!

Thomas Saueressig is still struggling with consolidation and harmonization in application development. The numerous cloud acquisitions with very different system architectures are not making life easy for him. The sugar coating trick is still alive, although no longer in the form of Excel CSV files, is it? A few years ago, the interface between ERP/ECC 6.0 and the Ariba platform was a CSV file transfer using PI/XI of the NetWeaver stack.

Much has improved in the SAP universe: Some cloud applications were able to move to the Hana database platform. Thus, the superficial icing has been replaced by technical database integration. Quite rightly, however, Thomas Saueressig noted that sustainable added value can only arise from a consolidated end-to-end process.

But since master data-based end-to-end processes are not a trivial task - all business partner entities have to be harmonized - SAP reached deep into its bag of tricks and uses Fiori as a consolidation tool. Now, Thomas Saueressig is working as a confectioner and creating optical end-to-end processes from cloud to on-premises. Cheers!

The way out of the dilemma: The end-to-end integration promised by SAP CEO Christian Klein does not take place at the syntactic database level - i.e., based on data models and algorithms, as classic SAP legacy customers are familiar with from ERP/ECC 6.0 - but at the semantic level. A Fiori frosting is poured over everyone, just like a cake. This makes everything taste sweet and uniform - but consistency in terms of content is not established!

The famous drill-down to the real document from R/3 times will probably no longer be possible with this Fiori integration, so SAP's added value has also been lost. In the case of Qualtrics, the existing SAP customer will now ask himself why he didn't just buy a sophisticated customer experience software from Adobe, for example; this software can also be integrated into SAP Business Suite 7 via a pretty and sweet interface - Fiori.