Is SAP missing out on the Internet?

It was a gray and sad time. SAP had the best black-box ERP in the world with R/3, but no affinity for openness, agility and master data management. The bunker mentality was summed up with the question: Is SAP sleeping through the Internet?

SAP's colorful answer was: mySAP.com. By its very nature, it was not an answer, but merely a cheap marketing gimmick. The multicolored mySAP logo was printed on mouse pads and business cards. The R/3 Enterprise subsequent releases mySAP ERP 2004/2005 were unusable. The support from India at that time was a disaster.

For the younger generation of my readers: After the disastrous mySAP ERP in 2004 and 2005, SAP consolidated the mess with ECC 5.0 and ERP/ECC 6.0, also called SAP Business Suite 7, which is still in use today.

Ultimately, however, SAP is trying to forget this difficult time, ignoring it and now following R/3 with S/4. The mantle of silence is gladly spread over what lies in between. What will become of Suite 7 with AnyDB?

My readers know me as a Manager Magazin subscriber and admirer of MM editor Eva Müller. Now, my colleague Christina Kyriasoglou has published an interview with SAP's top manager Sindhu Gangadharan in Manager Magazin, in which she reports on how she wants to drive further innovation for the Group as head of SAP Labs India.

Right off the bat, the innovation Sindhu Gangadharan cites as an example was a cringe-inducing déjà vu. More than a year ago, I saw this "innovation" as a TV commercial for an optician and on the Internet - which amply proves that SAP is once again not innovating but chasing the mainstream, or in the words of Sindhu Gangadharan in the MM interview: "With a start-up from our Accelerator, we digitally mapped in-store shopping for an optical chain. With augmented reality, AR, customers can try out their new glasses on the sofa at home. In 2020, we opened an Innovation Center Network in India for future technologies such as AR. There we are looking at how we can use new technologies in our products with a development horizon of three to five years. We work a lot with artificial intelligence, for example."

It may well be the case that German TV programs cannot be received in India, and one can only advise Sindhu Gangadharan to turn up the TV for a few hours in her hotel room the next time she visits SAP in Germany.

It is typical for our SAP: to embarrass itself again and again without any need! Professor Hasso Plattner thus remains the truly all-important personality. He seems to be and remain the only innovator by a very wide margin.

However, there is one aspect of Sindhu Gangadharan's answer that we in the SAP community could do with: Development horizon of three to five years. I and my friends from DSAG and ASUG would be very happy to see SAP roadmaps with a horizon of three to five years. What will happen with AnyDB and Hana by 2027/2030 and what will happen with S/4 after that?

Is SAP missing out on the Internet, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, IIoT, cloud and edge computing, and more? Yes. SAP is involved with all of these topics, but only second-hand. In the form of collaborations, it tries to follow the IT zeitgeist. But you won't find anything original at SAP, will you?

The last innovation to date was Plattner's in-memory computing. SAP turned it into the Hana database. In this context, the YouTube video "Hasso on Hasso" produced and staged ten years ago is remarkable. At the end, the professor predicts new programming languages as the next computer science revolution, which has also come about with no-code/low-code development. And what does SAP make of it?

First licenses Mendix from Siemens, then invents Ruum, buys Signavio and takes over AppGyver. SAP's PKL thus contains four offers for no-code/low-code programming tools. Is that a fourfold remedy for oversleeping? No answer.