Why Is SAP Justified in Lying About S/4HANA? - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

SAP told enormous lies about S/4HANA.
Is SAP justified in lying about S/4HANA for competitive reasons?

Introduction

This article is in response to a question we received about the reports of problems with S/4HANA.

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.

Is It Ok For S/4HANA to Lie?

“You may have plenty of evidence of SAP marketing machine running strong…However, the world is also spinning awfully fast. Prior to iPhone’s introduction, Nokia was selling 1 out of every two mobile phones in the world. Few could have foreseen its demise in merely a few years… In a winner take all world today, customers rightfully and perhaps naively demand flashy solutions as the key for survival. Many also demanded faster IT solution refresh cycles under the name of Agile, which again could be debatable. SalesForce came out of a small office in SF to be the king of CRM, essentially forcing SAP to reboot through internal and external moves….. Under customer and competitive pressure, SAP has every reason to market forward-looking solutions… If you decide to buy a car only based on a TV commercial, is it all the fault of car companies?”

Our Response

“If S/4HANA were a car, it could not be purchased. Consumer protection laws are in place that would stop it from being sold as it would be an incomplete car missing various components. So I would stay away from any examples in the consumer market. I found this comment you made odd. “You may have plenty of evidence of SAP marketing machine running strong…However, the world is also spinning awfully fast. ” So this is a problematic comment. It puts you in the category of people who do not care what is true.

Now let us look at this part of your comment. “In a winner take all world today, customers rightfully and perhaps naively demand flashy solutions as the key for survival. Many also demanded faster IT solution refresh cycles under the name of Agile, which again could be debatable.” This translates into a justification for lying. But SAP has no justification for lying like this. No company deserves to “win” by lying. And lying makes the market less efficient, not more efficient. This is similar to the catch me if you can argument used by salespeople that I covered in this article Caveat Emptor: Catch Me if You Can. SAP is not “keeping pace” with other liars in a “winner take all world.” It is the pacesetter. See this article where we put SAP in the bottom category of vendors in terms of accuracy Honest Vendors Ratings for SAP.”

Conclusions

Customers were aggressively misled, and the culprits are obvious. Now there is an attempt by those that make money from SAP are about justifying this lying by any means necessary.