SAP and sewage pipes

After some months of not-so-interesting-to-me blog posts of Martin Fowler the post of the 29.07.10 triggered my thoughts about software development, SAP and sewage pipes:

Fowler posted the blog entry "UtilityVsStrategicDichotomy"

He gives some sources and some thoughts about two different characters of software development depending on its business purpose.
On the one side there is software development as a utility for getting a standard task somehow done much like sewage pipes deal with used water and nobody cares about how they get the job accomplished.
The other side is software development as a strategic purpose where businesses in the respective domain are trying to be more competitive to gain influence or preserve a position of power in a market and differentiate themselves from the rest.

SAP to me is definitely about utility though they claim that they are innovative and give strategic advantages.
Well ERPs provide for standard business functions such as accounting, material management, sales execution and the like. How much more "standard" can you be? Every pay roll system should be more or less the same in a given country. Definitely you do not want to have an innovative pay roll system.
Where SAP is really going into strategic areas like perhaps data analysis tools (SAP BI) they are certainly not at the top of its competitors though they bought Business Objects that might help them. I have the impression that SAP tends to sell to businesses that their software does not need serious development after being shipped to the customer. If everybody runs SAP out of the box how can they really differ at what they do as a business and show innovation then?
So SAP is about utility. What about strategic software development?

Is strategic software development not always individual software development? The business functions that are real differentiators should be and certainly are sustained by strategic software systems if automated to some degree. I guess these business functions are not running SAP but they need to integrate with it. And I guess a lot of engineers curse this sewage pipe system at every minute of integration work.

PS: But the cursing is just perhaps their contempt for the sewage pipe engineers. But they are also just humans and hey these guys get the job done somehow who cares.