There is a difference between working hard and working smart. SAP CEO Christian Klein is certainly working hard, but his efforts aren’t translating into happier customers or higher share prices.
A paradox: SAP does not appear to change, even though a lot of effort goes into programming, customization, and consulting. There are meetings, online events, and a 50th anniversary celebration with nearly 1,000 guests and many anecdotes from the past. There are invitation-only Sapphire Now events around the world. However, everything will appear exactly as in previous years.
A closer look at the state of things, however, shows that nothing is really happening at SAP: The company appears frozen in time, immobile and rigid. Not really doing anything. Nothing significant, strategic, or visionary is happening. The only message for the future: We will keep S/4 in maintenance until 2040. Nothing else is happening – but doing nothing is not an option!
Community paralysis
An example: The famous and successful SolMan needed a successor for the age of cloud computing. In theory, ILM, Information Lifecycle Management, could succeed SolMan, but there was no further development for three years. There are SAP partners who are waiting for revival and revival. Until that happens, they too are frozen in time, motionless and rigid.
Clearly, there is paralysis coming from SAP that has now gripped large parts of the SAP partner community. Who will blink first? Who will talk first? Or we don’t need to talk to each other anymore?
Journalists writing for WiWo have calculated that SAP CEO Christian Klein has destroyed approximately 60 billion in stock market value over the past two years. If the DAX had developed similarly to the SAP, the index would currently stand at around 8,500 points. Alarm bells should ring 24/7 in SAP and the partner community. This crisis has already reached SAP customers. They react and verify new IT partners because users know that doing nothing is not an option.
The price for doing nothing
The calmness and indifference with which Christian Klein and many managing directors of SAP’s partner companies are currently acting seems puzzling. While many SAP customers are looking beyond their familiar horizons to find interesting logistics, IoT, AI, and HR offerings, doing nothing seems like a plausible option for theirs.
SAP customers will remain SAP customers, but inaction by SAP and some partners will force them to reduce their share of SAP-based solutions – to the benefit of ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and AWS. Many functionalities previously delivered by SAP will come from competitors in the future. SAP is paying the price for years of inactivity.