SAP Solution: Vishal Sikka

Good connoisseurs of SAP history are getting queasy, albeit with a sense of déjà vu. Professor Hasso Plattner meets Shai Agassi and officially makes him Chief Technology Officer and unofficially his "foster son.

Earlier this year, E-3 magazine had SAP CEO Bill McDermott on its cover with the title "Genius Salesman." That was the beginning of the turnaround. The departure from a business model that made SAP great and rich. The two departures - Bernd Leukert and Björn Goerke - are proof and the logical consequence for the...

Good connoisseurs of SAP history are getting queasy, albeit with a sense of déjà vu. Professor Hasso Plattner meets Shai Agassi and officially makes him Chief Technology Officer and unofficially his "foster son.

When Professor Hasso Plattner and former Chief Technology Officer Vishal Sikka presented the "revolutionary" Hana many years ago, the message was: no version numbers, eternal compatibility, never again release changes.

Anyone analyzing the personnel development of the SAP Executive Board after Henning Kagermann comes to the conclusion that there are three personalities who decide on success: Hasso Plattner, Werner Brand and Gerd Oswald. But what happens next?

Misspelling a person's name is undoubtedly a bad habit. At least one person will notice this act of disrespect. But what about company and product names? SAP's in-memory computing database Hana is a good example and topic of conversation in almost every issue of E-3 Magazine.

With Industry 4.0, some topics are being reassessed: E-3 Editor-in-Chief Peter Färbinger spoke with G.I.B Managing Director Michael Schuster about the new importance of logistics and algorithms.

Hana has many parents. Numerous database engines come together to form a respectable overall concept. This conglomerate of good ideas, own and purchased software was and is not always easy to master.

Life is change. Of course, double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Italy. Standard business software was first developed in Germany by SAP and Nixdorf. But the USA has more Nobel Prize winners in economics.

When the IT world was still in order: The server manufacturers supplied the operating system. Mostly it was Unix and sometimes VMS for DEC-VAX servers. From Oracle came the database. Later, IBM came along with DB2. And Microsoft tried to sneak in with Windows NT and the young SQL server. R/3 was sitting on top of all of them, and SAP conquered the...

Dakota Indian wisdom says, "If you discover you're riding a dead horse, get off!"