How Large Consulting Firms Exaggerate The Costs of AWS Services

Executive Summary

  • AWS has added to its partnership stable with larger consulting companies for SAP.
  • These large consulting companies have had a habit of high-cost implementations.

Introduction

A primary benefit of using cloud services is that the costs are transparent, and it gives more control over to the customer. However, companies like AWS and GCP do not offer the type of support common in the on-premises vendors. This has caused these providers to partner with firms to provide this consulting. However, what does this mean for costs?

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Who Are AWS Partners?

We performed the following search for partners on AWS’s partner search website.

Here is a sample.

Notice many companies on this list. Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, Tata Consulting Services, Wipro, and others. These are companies that have been ripping off their clients for years. These companies are SAP partners and distribute false information to their customers as part of the SAP partnership agreement. 

Bringing Corruption to the Cloud?

The original idea of leveraging cloud services was in part of getaway from these corrupt overcharging consulting firms. Like Monacle or Linke, some of these firms do not have experience with some of these firms, so we will not comment on them for good or ill, but we would not trust many of the companies on this list, and we routinely find them misleading clients on SAP.

The Markup of Consulting Services

Consulting services represent a high cost versus license costs, which is true even when license costs are high, such as the case with SAP and Oracle. However, the major consulting companies focus on SAP and Oracle because it allows them to bill the maximum number of hours to their clients. However, in the case of AWS or GCP, the costs are meager compared to SAP or Oracle.

If these same consulting companies are used, much of the cloud’s cost savings will be diluted. Secondly, the poor quality of the information provided by these consulting companies will lead to enormous cloud waste, as they produce extraordinary waste in the on-premises environments presently.

An IT department with extreme waste? This means that a major IT consulting firm is typically in the house, extracting as much as possible from the client.

Bringing Horrible Advice to the Cloud

We analyze the advice given by large consulting companies on SAP for clients. And in general, we consider the large consulting firms’ information to be of poor quality. The advice is inherently backward engineered from the conclusion, and the outcome is determined from on high by people with significant financial bias due to their compensation.

The major consulting firms are filled with content-free salespeople (called partners) who will repeat anything the large vendors say. They will also take the major vendors’ views on how to leverage the cloud, which will mean recommending paying the maximum markup to SAP or Oracle and maximizing the waste on the account.

Conclusion

The large SAP consulting firms have shown themselves to maximize the costs of SAP and Oracle projects. If they are brought in to do AWS or GCP or Azure work, they will do the same to those projects. AWS and GCP are inherently less corrupt in their model than SAP or Oracle. However, AWS at least is playing with fire by bringing these partners into the fold, and it will no doubt be negative for customers.