How SAP Customers Turn into SAP Conference Monkeys

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Executive Summary

A conference monkey is an SAP customer who provides false information at conferences in return for SAP compensation.
We describe how the conference monkey system works.

Introduction

It is customary to think that consulting companies and software vendors will tell lies to increase their sales in many conferences. But what is surprising to many is that many customers also will lie.

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.

Case Studies

In the Brightwork Research & Analysis study on S/4HANA Implementation Study, there were numerous public case studies where the customer representative lied about what occurred on the S/4HANA implementation. The following are examples:

Florida Crystals: The CIO stated that Florida Crystals upgraded to S/4HANA in 3 weeks.
New York Life: New York Life presented the idea that they implemented S/4HANA to use S/4HANA’s ledger. The representative for New York Life stated that they moved to S/4HANA to consolidated many different ledgers. However, one could have merged the ledgers into a single ledger. Yet, that could have been done with ECC.
Hillary’s Blinds: The representative for Hillary’s Blinds has told all manner of incorrect statements, not only related to S/4HANA but to quite a few other applications, including pretending that moving CRM to HANA made a significant improvement in CRM.

Conference Monkeys

SAP has several customers where the members of the customers have the incentive or receive the incentive to lie about the status of S/4HANA. This is a problem that extends to all SAP products.

A conference monkey is a high ranking individual from a customer who willing to lie about the functionality, implementation speed, etc. A conference monkey may benefit from SAP from being placed at a new position and a better position by SAP when a spot opens up. A conference monkey lies on command, with the expectation of receiving something in return. They are critical in providing misinformation to the market, and therefore reducing the quality of the information in the market. Just about all the conference monkeys are CIOs or out of the IT department. This gets into the topic of whom the IT department owes its allegiance, covered in the following article.

Salespeople lie all the time to get deals.
Consulting companies lie all the time to get consulting contracts.
Senior members of companies lie on everything from the budgets to the success of their implementations. In this case, they are merely lying for career reasons. This means that much of the information at SAP conferences is unreliable.