Ah, disruption. It's so much fun to do to others, but uncomfortable when others are doing it to you. Or, in SAP's case, to oneself. As Steve Hamm writes, SAP's SaaS efforts seem destined to fail. Not because the company doesn't have 3,000 people and $400M sunk into SaaS. It does, as I've written before No, SAP's problem is that it has billions of (dollars of) reasons to stay the same. Successful. Until it's not. Ah, disruption. It’s so much fun to do to others, but uncomfortable when others are doing it to you.Or, in SAP’s case, to oneself.As Steve Hamm writes, SAP’s SaaS efforts seem destined to fail. Not because the company doesn’t have 3,000 people and $400M sunk into SaaS. It does, as I’ve written before No, SAP’s problem is that it has billions of (dollars of) reasons to stay the same. Successful. Until it’s not.Steve Hamm sums up the problem nicely:What’s going on here is that SAP has to market its new product without cannabalizing its old cash-cow products. That’s going to be very difficult. It’s clear from the stellar performance of Salesforce.com that on-demand services have struck a chord with corporations of all sizes. And now Dave Duffield, founder of PeopleSoft, has a new company called Workday that’s about to release a whole range of run-the-business applications in the on-demand mode. So SAP has to be in the game. Yet most all of its revenues and profits now come from old fashioned software. Bruce Cleveland, a venture capitalist who used to run the on-demand division for Siebel Systems, now part of Oracle, did a good job of summing up SAP’s challenges in a response to an e-mail from me today: “As long as they’re a public company, I don’t believe they can make this transformation. It’s absolutely the right strategy, but the internal DNA of the company will defy their ability to support both business models.” Cleveland should know. That’s partly what led to Siebel’s collapse, which forced it to sell out to Oracle.It’s difficult to break with tradition, especially when those traditions have served you well. It’s even difficult to break with tradition when it’s blindingly obvious that you must, as was the case for Novell back in 2002. Open source was the answer to many of the company’s problems, but getting the culture and business around open source was/is non-trivial. Sometimes the ghosts of our past constitute our biggest barriers for the future. Open Source