I was in California last week relishing NetSuite’s SuiteWorld – and its two decades of cloud maturity and growing industry functionality as I summarized here. I happened to see a 8 page color SAP insert in the Wall Street Journal and I shook my head at drivel like “When you Run Live, you Run Simple. And when you Run Simple, you win.” Add that to all the meaningless HANA commercials and obnoxious spokesperson, “Phil” you have to roll your eyes at the marketing money SAP is wasting.
However, something remarkable was happening at SapphireNow in Orlando. As Bob Ferrari notes CEO Bill McDermott in his keynote, “openly admitted that he ditched his original keynote content 15 days before Sapphire. The reason cited was some pointed feedback received from customer CIO’s as well as from SAP Board members. Instead, the message was one of acknowledgement that SAP was not listening and responding to customer feedback. McDermott therefore declared that empathy would be the number one message delivered.”
Ferrari generously gives my book SAP Nation credit for opening SAP’s eyes. That’s very nice of him, but does beg the question what the heck have SAP executives being doing for the last several years?
McDermott gave out his email and invited customers to write directly to him. Nice gesture, but customers have been signaling to him in many more forceful ways. Thousands of customers have ring fenced and two-tiered around SAP.
John Appleby, a SAP partner tweeted from the event : Great quote: "Every relevant software company in the world in the last 10 years was created in a gap which SAP left behind". To which I responded “translate that from customer pov. In last decade SAP has delivered little for over $150 bn in maintenance fees.” Over 200 customers have moved to third party maintenance, and from my recent Rimini Street briefing series I can tell you they are getting better returns than they were promised and are doing reference calls with tons of other SAP customers. Countless SAP customers have been moving infrastructure to the cloud, re-bidding their application management outsourcing contracts.
If the SAP field has not been reporting all this back to McDermott and the board something is dramatically wrong at SAP. As Vijay Vijaysankar of IBM observes: The “surprise” for me honestly was that SAP leaders themselves seemed to be surprised by what they heard from the CIOs they spoke to. This frustration has been there for a while amongst customer ecosystem.”
The irony is SAP executives were expressing empathy while the partner booths at Sapphire continue to be as giant as ever. It’s a visible sign of the $ 300 billion annual burden on SAP customers.
I am afraid attendees to this year’s Sapphire will have the same reactions I had noted in SAP Nation.
But like so much else in Orlando, Sapphire Now is kitsch, a pleasant escape from reality. When they return home, attendees realize their SAP environment is not “simple” or “minimalist,” words SAP executives frequently use. They look back and wish technology works as well as it did at the event, which supports nearly 100,000 iPads, smartphones, laptops, and the walkie-talkies and pagers of the event attendees, security staff and “roadies.” They wonder why SAP cannot extend its influence on its partners beyond the event. At the event, SAP has guidelines for exhibitors concerning every little detail: signage, dress codes, professional behavior, employment solicitation and “sensitive and/or non-complementary” materials.
As they share all the freebies they picked up at the event with their kids, it strikes the event attendees that nothing in the SAP economy is really free. They chuckle about the all-too- real joke they heard in Orlando: “SAP stands for ‘send another payment.”
Many customers have gone beyond chuckling.
And depressingly I have not been to Sapphire in years. Little appears to have changed.
