I excerpt 10% from every book in a series of blog posts. I posted several on SAP Nation 3.0 in April, then took a break after the Sapphire event. Over the next week I will excerpt the final batches. The book is available to purchase on Amazon in print and eBook format here
”SAP has the biggest “business applications” laboratory — across business process, geography and industry. However, every few years SAP gets bored with applications and dabbles in platform and infrastructure areas. It seeks out partners and acquisitions to grow its applications’ reach when a better approach would be to partner with its customers. It is sitting on the mother lode of business process and enterprise application innovation and that’s where they need to put their focus. Fahey of Louisiana- Pacific described one such example around IBP in Chapter 3.
The industry desperately needs a business application leader. After two decades, when you look at the global and industry landscape of applications, only about 20% is available in the public cloud. Most application vendors are investing heavily in platforms. In a way, it’s abdication. A good analogy would come from the food sector. You go to a restaurant you really like and the chef says we have changed our business model. We are only serving semi-cooked meals now. Enjoy the meal at home. Or come on in, but be aware we are now offering grills. You bring your own ingredients and cook your own. That’s similar to what SaaS vendors are doing with their emphasis on platforms when they are being paid to deliver “cooked meals” in the form of applications."
" In Ch. 10, Bell of Uptake talked about a new way of selling — one focused on customer outcomes, not TCO or ROI. Even if that is too far a bridge, Sommer challenges SAP to think differently in the current economic model: “While I know there would be substantial backlash to this — from Wall Street for sure — I think SAP needs to get to the point where they EARN a customer’s business every single month. That means getting rid of long-term subscriptions, not charging for software until after the customer is in production, having reasonable renewable subscription pricing, a commitment to ever lower pricing (a la Amazon AWS), etc.”
"As we discussed in Chapter 9 in the section around IA, value in enterprise software has been moving away from transaction processing to analytics, intelligence and machine learning. Automation in the form of sensors and wearables is perform- ing edits and validations ERP and CRM software used to do in the past. Their pricing needs to reflect that shrunk role. Finally, SAP is starting to talk open source in SCP, and as it evolves its developer ecosystem. This brings even higher expectations of very different economics."
" For over a decade, SAP has branded itself with its “Run Better” and “Run Simple” campaigns. Indeed, in 2018, in a marketing survey, it was named the most valuable German brand and ranked even higher than BMW and Mercedes-Benz.88 The enduring image, however, of SAP in the enterprise technology world is that of its ERP products, and there, expensive ones. Between the unforced errors like IA (which we discussed in detail in Ch. 9) and the persistence of 35-year-old technologies like ABAP in the customer base, you could argue that SAP actu- ally has a brand challenge. Wright of Accuride, Hortovanyi and others have pointed out that ECC and ABAP are not attractive to young technology talent. As Dennett discussed in Ch. 4, it also has to become better respected in open source and ML circles. Mueller of SAP talks about expanding its image way beyond ERP. All these factors point to a need to rethink the branding."
