Problems start at fifty.

The momentum dwindles, the feet become heavy, the head sluggish.

Why dive into the Tik-Tok world when things are going really well?

It will be, always has been.

Basically everyone knows that this hope is deceptive.

Whoever stands still falls behind.

If you don't change, you will be changed.

Bernd Freytag

Business correspondent Rhein-Neckar-Saar based in Mainz.

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At SAP, this realization matured again four years ago.

At that time, the powerful co-founder and chairman of the supervisory board, Hasso Plattner, brought the only 38-year-old Christian Klein to the board.

There has never been a younger head of a Dax company.

His job was as unusual as it was big: he was supposed to get the German IT flagship group fit for digitization.

The most valuable company in Germany for a long time, with more than 100,000 employees who are usually very well paid, the largest software company in Europe, the world market leader for software for corporate management;

a corporation that wants to lead thousands of other companies into the digital world with its programs had to be rebuilt itself.

Transformation is the name of the task and it is still not done.

As with every medium-sized company, departments have formed at SAP over the years that are no longer up to date.

Old structures and processes that no longer fit with the times, too slow, too sealed off, continue to spark as if programs were still installed manually on each individual computer.

Departments that duck away from artificial intelligence and big data.

Klein has to make SAP fit for the cloud world.

Where programs are no longer installed on customers' computers.

Rather, software is a service that must be available everywhere and at all times via the cloud.

This requires manufacturers not only to program differently, but also to think differently.

The applications must first and foremost be user-friendly, lean, fast and cheap, no more time-consuming projects worth millions.

The competitors are huge

It is not yet foreseeable whether the renewed skinning of SAP will succeed.

The Internet giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba with their apparently inexhaustible computing power set the pace in the cloud business.

And new, young, hungry companies are constantly coming onto the market that are leaner, faster and have more sex appeal than the civil law company founded fifty years ago as SAP system analysis and program development.

Back then, in April 1972, the meanwhile legendary founding quintet of five former IBM employees Hasso Plattner, Dietmar Hopp, Claus Wellenreuther, Hans-Werner Hector and Klaus Tschira were themselves truly visionary.

When they set up their own business in Weinheim near Heidelberg instead of staying in the IBM nest they had made.

Back then, the men programmed their first computer programs for company accounting on punched cards.

It was a bold and visionary step at a time when there was still a lot of money to be made from hardware and programs were only seen as a tired bonus.

Usually in the evenings and at weekends, when the expensive local computers were free, the founders fine-tuned their first development contract for a nearby chemical company, the ICI nylon fiber factory in Östringen near Heidelberg.

ICI is said to have saved 60,000 marks a month with the new programs.

SAP created the market for business software almost single-handedly and was in business right from the start.