Edward Carr, the editorial director of the Economist , is quoted in my book, The New Polymath:
“Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing."
Several EIs had a chance to sit down with Bill McDermott, co-CEO and Vishal Sikka, CTO of SAP (separately) during SapphireNow. I asked them both:
"How long can SAP continue as a software pure play, when Microsoft is spending billions on data centers, Oracle in buying Sun, IBM and HP continuing to expand their foot print?"
Both in different ways said the same thing
"Companies don't want stacks. They want specific functionality. Stacks are about vendor lock-in. We want to partner with best of breed hardware, outsourcing firms"
How to reconcile this comfort with partial coverage with SAP's desire to own the complete functional footprint? Like a fox, SAP also wants to roam free across every world geography and industry.
I believe, in spite of all their protests to the contrary, SAP will similarly need to expand its presence across the stack. One of the least pleasant discussions with SAP management, year after year, is around its partner ecosystem - the costs, the overruns, the failures. Till SAP gets its hands deep into data center operations and massively scaled application management, it will continue to leave customers to the mercy of its partners.
In the meantime, McDermott tells his faithful during a press conference "In the end, suites always win". Stacks bring lock-in, suites do not? Now that's what I call crazy like a fox.
