The unwillingness of our existing customers to swap out their ERP platforms and shift to the cloud should have been painfully obvious to our leadership. Before I was an employee of SAP I was a customer and went thru an extensive and "extremely expensive" implementation phase lasting well over two years. There are so many costs customers have to expend to get the SW performing to the point of satisfactory ROI., There are outside consultants, countlessa internal process owners who give up their regular jobs to help with the transition, training, travel, lost productivity, etc, etc... Simply put, I can tell you first hand that when a customer invested so heavily in our ERP platform, they were "a customer for life"
So to think that after all of this expense over such a protractracted period that our customers, many of whom are Fortune 100 to 500, will just drop their ERP platform and go over to the cloud is at best ridiculous and short sighted.
Clear that our leadership wants to shut down our ERP business which was once best in class and world's largest platform and have all our existing customers go into the cloud business where we compete with every minute operation on the planet, but does it really make sense? Would it have been wise for Henry Ford after he had made a successful launch in the auto business to say, we no longer will make automobiles but we will shift to lawnmowers because Americans will need these for the new homes they will buy that have lawns. or would it have been smart for John D Rockfeller to say Standard Oil will get out of the oil business and venture into bottled water business because people will need to carry water with them in the future??
Make no mistake SAP is where it is today because of the monumental business our ERP platforms afforded us. These are not throw away platforms that get swapped out every couple of years - companies buy these systems for decades to come. The wiser move would have been to maintain our foothold in the ERP biz that spun off hundreds of millions in just annual maintenance fees and then to enter in parallel the cloud biz, but alas our leaders see things differently.
And so somewhere there is a company waiting for the SAP giant to die off and exit the ERP business (and as well exit our legacy customers) and then such a company will swoop in and provide the support on our customer's EFP business that we simply just walked away from and then they will make "Billions" that we threw away in lieu of a low margin / high turnover cloud biz. Ahh, what could have been. ??