How Accurate Was SAP on SAP Simplifying The Customer's IT Landscape?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has stated that SAP simplified the customer’s IT landscape.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

What SAP Said About SAP Simplifying The Customer’s IT Landscape

What is now mostly forgotten is that SAP marketed its ERP system because it would be the last system that a customer would need to purchase. Presented beginning back in the 1980s, the concept was that companies that had mostly custom developed their systems could lower their maintenance and integration overhead by using a “single system,” which would be the ERP system. This would allow a company to use a “single system,” which would lead to a significant simplification of the IT landscape with associated cost savings.

Our References for This Article

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Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

The Truth About SAP Simplifying The Customer’s IT Landscape?

As covered in the book The Real Story Behind ERP: Separating Fiction from Reality, ERP did nothing to simplify the system landscape. After SAP had sold in a vast number of accounts in the 1990s, they began developing other applications to connect to the ERP system. Secondly, unlike what SAP claimed, the cust0mers were not able to decommission their pre-existing systems. They either had to keep them running and integrate them with SAP or re-code them in ABAP.

If one looks at a solution architectural Visio diagram, they are more complicated than they were in the 1980s, which ERP systems were supposed to eliminate.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for SAP, simplifying the customer’s IT landscape.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.