"When you die and go to hell, Delta still makes you change planes in Atlanta" is an old joke among airline passengers.
Delta's storied hub is also its Achille's heel. Ditto with United and O'Hare. American and DFW. Airlines like Southwest, by offering non-stops between pairs of cities make a hub look so unattractive, other than for long, international flights. From my home town, Southwest now has nonstops to 30 cities. Hubs represent another potential point of failure and delay in an industry struggling with so many other issues. As Richard Branson says in this article "The American traveling public has proven, with their dollars, where the future lies for commercial air travel: next generation, low fare, point-to-point carriers."
But what does Atlanta have to do with SAP? Follow along with me.
For the last couple of years, SAP (and Oracle and other enterprise vendors) has been trying to paint itself as innovative. This week at TechEd in Munich, it smartly allowed its customers to show case innovations. So much better than SAP trying to market itself.
But these customers already "live in Atlanta". To them, SAP is a non-stop carrier since they live in the hub location. They have sunk so much into SAP and now are getting the incremental innovation benefits. But there are plenty of SAP customers who got fatigued or ran out of money as they tried to move to "Atlanta". Many others live nowhere near "Atlanta" (and use Oracle or whatever). If SAP can deliver point to point service - standalone applications - to them they would be interested.
The best innovation SAP should aspire for is a radical new delivery and business model - like Dayjet is trying. Small, bite-sized, affordable applications. Prettying up "Atlanta" and showing me widgets and bells and whistles cannot mask the fact that there is an ugly beast underneath. It actually makes me go gulp - by reminding me they have not lowered my risk of being stuck in "Atlanta".
