Are Brightwork's Statements Too General Versus SAP?

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Executive Summary

SAP resources often critique Brightwork.
We review the statements by one SAP consultant regarding Brightwork’s specificity of critiques against SAP and check its validity.

Introduction

We sometimes have surreal interactions on LinkedIn, where various pro-vendor individuals make unsupported claims.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

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.

Are Brightwork’s Statements to General?

This following statement was provided by Mohamed Judi, who, at the time of this comment, worked for SAP.

“Also, as you know, in technology, it is important to be specific and not make general comments like “the cost of SAP is more than others” or “the performance is bad” or “most customers are ditching SAP”.” – Mohamed Judi

Our Response

I don’t see how our statements are more general than people that work at SAP.

Vishal Sikka stated that HANA would help cure cancer because genetic algorithms would run from within HANA (they had to run in the DB layer for speed).

Hasso Plattner stated that HANA was zero latency.

Steve Lucas stated that HANA allowed workers to work 5000 times more efficiently.

As you work for SAP, you are in a peculiar position to point to a lack of specificity in our articles and research. This is because top executives at your company make outrageous and highly generalized claims on every single quarterly call and at SAPPHIRE and in front of clients and on the website, etc.. So let us look at what you claimed we said that is too general.

As for comments we were to have made that were supposedly too general, let us review each.

“the cost of SAP is more than others”

The cost of SAP is more than others. Are you aware that SAP has more high expense ERP failures than any other vendor? National Grid’s multi-year SAP project ran into a $billion which we covered in How National Grid’s SAP Implementation Damaged a Company. Accenture etc… recommend SAP because it is so expensive. HANA is the most expensive database, even more, expensive than Oracle. We covered this in the article How to Understand HANA and S/4HANA Pricing.

We have 53 online calculators where you can check our estimations at How to Use the Enterprise Software Calculators. If you compare you will find SAP consistently has the highest TCO.

Furthermore, we have evaluated all of SAP’s statements around TCO and could not find a single instance where SAP substantiated its claims around TCO. I wrote a book on TCO titled Enterprise Software TCO, that explains the method we used. The book explains our research into software TCO and that we were not able to find a single vendor that provided an accurate TCO, and that furthermore, vendors do not want the customer to know TCO of their applications. We conclude that as soon as a vendor mentions TCO, the statement should be disregarded as their TCO will be incorrect and designed to minimize the impression of TCO.

“the performance is bad”

I assume this is coming from S/4HANA and HANA. The performance of Fiori is bad, which we covered with testing in the article Why is the SAP Fiori Cloud so Slow? HANA has performance problems with transaction processing and is a poor database for ERP systems, as we covered in the article How to Understand Why HANA is a Mismatch for S/4HANA. SAP will not provide competitive benchmarks for HANA, and our view is because HANA will perform poorly in those benchmarks as we covered in the article, The Hidden Issue with HANA SD Benchmarks. SAP changed benchmarks to hide HANA’s weakness in TP. Your comment makes it sound like we make unsupported statements. However, as you can see, we include extensive links to supporting articles.

You may not have the time or interest to read the supporting articles, but that does not mean we do not include the links.

“most customers are ditching SAP”

I would challenge you to find where we said this. This would be an odd thing to say. Remember, most SAP customers are highly invested in SAP. I may critique an SAP product or SAP’s value, but that is not the same thing as saying that most customers are ditching SAP. Most customers do have a large number of nonperforming SAP applications, but they keep them up and running in most cases. But you have not addressed any of the points that I made in the rebuttal article.

Consulting

Mohamed Judi provided a critique of Brightwork without search for or understanding the supporting research for each of the comments. Secondly, Mohamed Judi is extremely hypocritical in that he works for an entity, SAP, which makes enormously false claims about their products. Mohamed Judi, like most SAP resources, repeats these false claims without any concern for whether they are true.