Managing Automation - January 2009 - (Page 39) depend on the advice of the IT people because they don’t understand IT. Therefore, you find frustration. People say, “OK, I’m not really happy, but I cannot really influence this. I’m not on top of it.” You know, in business that is the worst that can happen. So, the more we can come to a constructive dialogue with the business and they feel they understand roughly that they are the ones that are in the driver’s seat, the better. A: Q: Yes. I think we have already 75,000. If 45% are from the mid-market, I’m not sure; it might be 40%. Forty-five is high. How do you maintain a culture of innovation as you get larger? A: Q: Do you think that if we could make more progress in making systems easier to use and more fully consumed, it would help to solve that problem? I wouldn’t say that we have to change something at €20 billion. I don’t think there’s a fundamental change necessarily. If you would say €30 billion or €40 billion, I think then you need some changes. That is very large. I guess, first of all, SAP would be much more division- I think easy to consume is a key topic for the future. The easier you can consume the assets, let’s say, the more business will be satisfied, no doubt. There’s a second point that’s very important. The question is can I rely on what I consume? It’s like nutrition. That means is my infrastructure in IT good enough that I can blindly rely on the quality of what I consume? That’s a key piece. A: Q: But if we’re moving more in the direction of making fact-based decisions generated by increasingly intelligent systems, we’re going to change the relationship that business has with IT because right now in business a lot of it is still intuitive, right? “I had my good times and my bad times, but it was definitely better than staying at the university.” A: Yes. I think that’s something that we discussed earlier about automation. I think we will come over time to, let’s say, a degree of automation where systems can make decisions. But I have my doubts if we go too much into decisions where human intuition is important. You see it now with the financial system. I think automation should go as far as people understand the decisions. Therefore, I come back to the beginning. You’re right. As long as we are quick, we understand, then it’s fine. If it’s beyond our capacity, we should be very careful. It’s like driving. You should only drive as fast as you can master the car. Let’s turn to SAP Are you still confi. dent that SAP will make your 2010 goal of 100,000 customers, 45% of which will come from companies under €1 billion in revenue, as you move into 2009 now? alized than today. That would be obvious. From an engineering point of view, I think we have started a lot of initiatives to manage this innovation. First was clearly this network of business partners. Another one is communities of innovation. Where we can do more, and will do more, is the supply chain. Let me challenge that €30 billion to €40 billion scenario. Is that realistic or will the law of large numbers come into play, and inevitably growth rates will come down simply because of size? Q: A: Q: A: Yes. I’m very confident that we will have more than 100,000 clients. Q: More than 100,000? Now, you have to always look at the market. I was sitting here many years ago and asked myself, “What happens if SAP continues to grow fast? We cannot have 70% market share. That’s impossible.” What you do is you start expanding your market. We do this. We had this goal for 2010 to double our addressable market. Look what we did between 1999 and 2004. We more or less did 50% of our product revenue in new products. We’re doing it again in the next five years. It was also one of the goals of 2010. We will get there. But there is a limit. You cannot always double. 39 January 2009
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.