SAP's new CEO, Léo Apotheker, made a startling confession at the introduction of SAP's Business Suite 7 in early February. The speed with which the global economy spiraled downward in the past six months, Apotheker contended, was due to the success of SAP's software.
"This crisis happened because we have interconnected the world," Apotheker told his audience. It was a surprising mea culpa, especially from a man who was announcing a product suite intended specifically to support that interconnected world.
This interconnectivity is hardly SAP's fault. Nor is SAP the only company, by a long shot, to have built the interconnected economy. But the notion that implementing SAP and other enterprise software systems was a major contributor to the speed with which the world's economy went south has significant ramifications for how we understand the depth of the crisis, and how quickly we can get out of it.