SAP as Center of Gravity

At Sapphire last week, Peter Graf, EVP of SAP Solution Marketing made a comment to me "SAP has become one of a shrinking number of centers of gravity". Ever since he made the comment I have been getting flashbacks of school experiments around magnetic fields.

He was explaining why there appeared to be more SIs on the expo hall floor than ever before. They had fewer viable software partners to focus on compared to a few years ago.

Then Erik Keller and I started to discuss the impact SAP's plans for a NetWeaver fund on the ISV community.

This was followed by a fascinating, but too short a discussion we both had with Zia Yusuf, recently named EVP for its Platform Ecosystem on how the ecosystem "magnetic field" would arrange itself around SAP.

Who would be part of the inner circle? Would customers decide or would SAP play favorites? Would SAP acquire those that made it to the inner circle as it did recently with Virsa? How would others in the outer circles behave?  With all this giddy attention at the center of it all, will SAP forget where "True North" is?

A few years ago, Hasso Plattner in a speech at a Sandhill conference told the audience to the effect of "if you do not join us, we will crush you". He was pre-mature. Years later, the stampede to join SAP's ecosystem may crush several ISVs and SIs along the way.

I have a feeling we will all be watching with fascination the magnetic field around SAP  over the next few years. And the magnet itself.