Monolithic Commerce Incumbents Are Falling Behind

SAP recently had its worst day in more than a decade, with a market cap drop of almost $40 billion dollars, after reporting a significant miss on its Q3 earnings. While they pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic, many technology companies saw significant growth during this time as clients looked to expedite digital transformation to keep up with the new normal.

The larger issue for SAP and other monolithic commerce incumbents has been a lack of product innovation as the technologies around them progressed. While it's not uncommon for a company to experience uncertainty and changes in direction after the departure of senior executives, the focus on growth via acquisition over the last decade has led to disparate products loosely tied together by marketing instead of well-integrated modern solutions.

"SAP implementation tends to take at least twice as long as they originally tell you and cost a lot more. And so, I'll just leave it at that. I also used to, you know, if I heard a company was implementing SAP, I would generally throw them out of my research queue..." - Motley Fool analyst Jim Gillies.