Back in 1972, four IBM engineers including Hasso Plattner, still Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP SE, proposed an original project: to create an IT system that integrates warehouse movement with accounting, a concept that today appears obvious but more than 40 years ago it was innovative.
IBM rejects it and then the 4 engineers decide to take risks, getting fired from IBM and starting the story of what is now the largest application software vendor in the world: SAP. The first customer was a German chemical industry. The system then ran on mainframes and the instructions, the “customizing”, took place via punched cards, which were the software standard then. It was called System-R, R / 1.
It does not take much to understand that that intuition, that connection between company compartments with a view to integrating and sharing information would have allowed the revolution that gave way to the concept of ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, especially between the logistic part and the financial-administrative part .
Between the end of the 70s and the 80s, we move to R / 2, still with a character interface, but in the 90s comes R / 3, based on a client / server architecture. R / 3 evolves over the years and increasingly becomes an extended technological and application platform, up to the ECC.6.0, the end point of the old R / 3 paradigm. Up to the present day, where the future is called S / 4 HANA and which will be the only system supported by SAP since 2025.
More than 40 years have passed from R / 1 to R / 2 to R / 3 to S / 4, which in terms of technology equals centuries of difference in terms of fast calculation, storage, performance and paradigms.
One wonders: but is it the evolution of the product that follows the needs of companies or vice versa? Probably they are two flows that condition each other: on the one hand there are companies on the market that, in order to remain competitive, must be able to design new products and services compatibly with the available budgets, they must be able to reduce costs, increase process efficiency, they must be able to collaborate along integrated supply chains, to mention a few critical aspects; on the other hand, the companies that produce and sell software such as SAP have found themselves faced with the dilemma of how to continue to develop business with companies, acquiring new ones and maintaining existing customers, providing them with the right tools to meet their requirements and to often make companies perceive new roads and new possibilities to be followed.
All this scenario is developing within a context of global competition between companies and software vendors, where technology is changing the way to develop solutions to business problems.
In fact, it is increasingly moving towards the concept of service use, which can be determined in terms of time, methods and costs thanks to the cloud paradigm. The standardization of clustered processes by business sectors and minor subsets seems to be the direction the major software vendors are taking. With S / 4 HANA, SAP proposes a vision based on a stable and consistent central core destined to remain so while the development and customization part is moved outwards, towards the “liquid” part of the ecosystem, destined to integrate applications SAP with other SAP and non-SAP applications, to connect scenarios related to the world of IoT and Machine Learning and all the other technological paradigms that are rapidly populating the world of the real imagery of the code, including the blockchain.
In this context it clearly emerges that it is extremely reductive to speak of an evolution of the species in the classical Darwinian sense, but of an exponential evolution: from thousands of years to a few months, in a continuous evolution of the applicative, technological and business scenarios.
The challenge for companies, software vendors and consulting companies is to take value from this scenario. The value should in fact be distributed among all subjects, without being a zero-sum game.
We are surely immersing ourselves more and more in an extremely liquid and changing world, where for companies that will be able to acquire a consistent marginal advantage by exploiting the scenarios mentioned above, vast fields of opportunities will open up. Those who are unable to grasp the strength of these changes will probably lose odds until they become extinct.