World-class software made in Germany is known to be a rarity. For decades, it has been found exclusively in the tranquil town of Walldorf, where SAP has established its reputation as a software icon, and put itself on a par with US competitors such as Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft.

But for some time now the Munich-based software start-up Celonis has been preparing to challenge SAP's unique selling point. The billion-dollar „unicorn“ also lays claim to the „world class“ seal of approval for its business process optimisation software.

SAP is no stranger to dealing with young, innovative rivals. In the USA, the Group has already seen itself under pressure from newcomers, who relegated SAP to second place with new software products for managing customer relationships or supply chains. In light of this painful experience, the Walldorf-based company has learned, and taken the Big Tech method as a role model. Firstly, buying in is faster than developing in-house. And the most elegant way is sometimes to acquire the young rival before its presence becomes too uncomfortable. However, this is now a stony path, since the anti-trust authorities view such deals with suspicion.

SAP supported Celonis early on, and later tried to acquire it. Subsequently SAP acquired process mining company Signavio, to avoid just leaving the field to the competition. The fact that the partnership with Celonis was subsequently cancelled is likely to cause the Munich-based start-up some headaches, despite its „world-class“ status. After all, the huge SAP customer base was a high-reach sales channel that Celonis now has to do without.

However, in the event that this is not enough to keep a young rival at bay, Big Tech has another piece of advice, and that is: secondly, self-preferencing helps. The lawsuit recently filed by Celonis gives the impression that SAP is disadvantaging the Celonis product using the same methods that Microsoft used to try to get rid of rivals such as Netscape or, more recently, Slack. But at this point, SAP should resist the temptation to do it the Microsoft way.