SAP to pull up its socks

EXPENSIVE GERMAN enterprise resource planning software outfit SAP, which can never explain what its products actually do, has admitted that it needs to try harder.

SAP has had a tough year as business customers wonder what the huge bill they got for software was all about.

Chief executive Leo Apotheker resigned last month and SAP's board installed Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe as co-chief executives.

If the New York Times hoped that Snabe in the job would mean less business jargon and a more practical approach it was sadly mistaken.

Snabe's first words were that SAP "needed to accelerate [its] innovation capability going forward."

While it is possible to accelerate backwards, we are not sure what an "innovation capability" is and if this is something that can be accelerated in any direction.

Later, he added, "What we want to do is increase the speed," and "I don't think we did a lot of wrong things in the past. We just have to do things much faster." We assume that he did not mean do wrong things quicker than ever.

McDermott added, "I do think we are a little bit bolder in terms of our clock speed." We can only guess that he doesn't want to get stuck in italic or left underlining everything.

The Times did not give up trying to get the pair to say something specific about their plans. After all they are supposed to be in charge of an outfit that makes expensive business planning software.

Snabe said that SAP's on-demand software group has now "embraced agile software development methods." This sounds to us like something out of the Kama Sutra, although we are not sure that many of the software developers that we have met over the years we would want to embrace.

Apparently the Times hack consulted his "SAP as a Second Language Guide" and discovered that agile coding is when a company relies on smaller teams of developers that constantly refine a product, send it out for testing, then take it back and refine it. We are not sure where cuddling comes in but that is bound to be more agile, too.

Snabe bragged that SAP cut about a third of the Business By Design team after it was shown that fewer bodies could produce better code faster. So "agile" means that developers have to work on two machines at the same time, apparently.

While the hacks were still a little dazed by all of this, SAP decided to have a pop at Oracle in the hope of scoring a cheap headline.

McDermott accused Oracle of being "focused on squeezing margins for the benefit of a stock price, rather than creating new products." Wow, these guys really know how to get newspapers to clean off the front page with your amusing punchy quotes.

In short, our impression is that SAP will continue to be as mysterious, one size fits none, and expensive for every company that buys it to customise and implement as ever. But it plans to be a bit more agile. µ