John Appleby’s False HANA Statements and the Mindtree Acquisition

Executive Summary

• For years John Appleby provided information about HANA to the market.
• There was a specific timing to when Appleby released false information around HANA.

Video Introduction: John Appleby’s False HANA Statements and the Mindtree Acquisition

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

We covered in The Appleby Accuracy Checker: A Study into John Appleby’s Accuracy on HANA the extremely low accuracy of John Appleby’s information over a period from roughly 2012 up to the present day. However, the false information supplied had a high intensity from 2013 to 2015 and then declined after 2015. Something particular happened in 2015, which may have been strongly motivational for Appleby to release false information on SAP HANA. There turned out to be an excellent reason for this, and it connected to the potential sale of Bluefin Solutions.

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. 

Appleby’s Role as Shill for SAP for HANA

John Appleby was “The Global Head of HANA” for the consulting firm Bluefin Solutions. And he was the primary shill for HANA, particularly from the period of 2013 to 2015. John Appleby routinely published false information around HANA is what appears to be a classic shill relationship with SAP.

SAP’s support for what Appleby was doing was evidenced even in the comments made by Hasso Plattner. Appleby is repeatedly bailed out by Hasso Plattner at specific instances when Appleby is losing debates against commenters, as we covered in the article John Appleby, Beaten by Chris Eaton in Debate and Required Saving by Hasso Plattner.

How Appleby’s Prominence Helped Build the Bluefin Solutions Brand

Before John Appleby building a prominent role in media with his HANA posts, most people that worked in SAP would have been unaware of Bluefin Solutions as a company. There is little doubt that Bluefin Solutions’ prominent (but now obviously misleading) role in promoting HANA was what would have made Bluefin Solutions particularly attractive to being acquired.

This was referenced in the acquisition press release.

The Acquisition of Bluefin Solutions Mindtree

On July 16, 2015, Mindtree announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Bluefin Solutions.

“Headquartered in the UK, Bluefin delivers solutions to some of the world´s most prestigious companies and has earned multiple awards including the SAP Pinnacle Award, SAP HANA Partner of the Year, SAP CRM Partner of the Year and SAP BI Partner of the Year. Bluefin offers one of the industry’s most highly regarded team of experts for transitioning to SAP HANA, digital and real-time-analytics.”

Well, this is exaggerated as most press releases are. But notice the focus on how Bluefin were experts in transitioning to SAP HANA.

Appleby’s Double Financial Incentive to Lie

Appleby would have already had a strong motivation to exaggerate HANA. Nearly all of the SAP consulting companies did, but Appleby’s articles put him in a special category of being the most prominent proponent of HANA. However, with the Mindtree acquisition on the horizon, where he, as a senior member, was very likely to receive a substantial payoff, would have had an even higher incentive to lie. Of the articles that we chose to evaluate for our The Appleby Accuracy Checker: A Study into John Appleby’s Accuracy on HANA, notice the dates on each article.

This is not an exhaustive list of Appleby’s articles, but these were some of the most notable.

Furthermore, Appleby’s production of articles dipped sharply after 2015. However, we did not draw a correlation to the Mindtree acquisition until after completing the Appleby Accuracy Check the Mindtree acquisition date.

It now appears that Appleby was making a particular effort to exaggerate HANA before the Mindtree acquisition, with his prominent articles tailing off after mid-2015. Being an insider, he would have known about the negotiations with Mindtree (and perhaps other potential buyers) many months before the acquisition was announced. By exaggerating HANA and Bluefin Solutions’ involvement in HANA projects, Appleby would have considerably increased the price of the buyout and thus his compensation. In financial manipulation, pushing up the cost of an asset that you know will decline after you sell it is called “pump and dump.” And it looks like this is what Appleby did with Bluefin Solutions.

Appleby’s Departure from Bluefin Solutions

Appleby convinced the world how great Bluefin Solutions’ HANA practice was that he led. Yet after the acquisition, Appleby leaves Bluefin Solutions along with other founders. Why? To us, it seems quite likely that post-acquisition, Mindtree found out the truth about Bluefin Solutions’ HANA practice. And recall that Bluefin Solutions was also being sold on “explosive” growth in HANA. So Mindtree was buying the future. This was a future that never materialized.

The overstatement of the HANA practice, along with the lack of growth meeting the pre-acquisition expectations, would have created friction with his owners. While it is not that unusual for founders to leave a consulting firm, if Appleby was a major asset to Bluefin Solutions and part of its acquisition, it seems odd that Mindtree did not incentivize him to stay.

Bluefin Solutions 4 Years Post Acquisition

Bluefin Solutions has seen its prominence decline in the SAP market since the acquisition. Four years ago, HANA had great growth plans, but in 2015, SAP stopped reporting customer numbers as we covered in the article Why Did SAP Stop Reporting HANA Numbers After 2015?

The reason for this was simple.

SAP was able to falsely publish its customers’ numbers in the 2012 to 2015 timeframe, with various consulting companies being counted as customers. However, after the ecosystem had been counted as customers, it was no longer possible to show a growth story, because HANA never took off. If SAP had continued to publish customer number for HANA per quarter as they had been, it would have been apparent that HANA’s growth had leveled off. It would have undermined the previous statements that HANA’s growth was “explosive” (Ron Enslin) or that HANA was “the fastest growing product in SAP’s history.” (McDermott, Appleby) After this point, SAP switched to publishing S/4HANA numbers.

Mindtree could have been forgiven for thinking it was purchasing an up-and-coming consulting firm, one with a special relationship between its “Global Head of HANA” and Hasso Plattner. But what Mindtree did not know, and could not have known as they were not a firm with SAP knowledge (Mindtree was purchasing Bluefin Solutions to gain entry into the SAP market). Most of the information John Appleby and Bluefin Solutions were releasing to the market was false. This would eventually have blowback, and if Bluefin Solutions were selling privately to customers on the same basis as the claims Appleby was making in print, it is an absolute certainty that Bluefin S0lutions ended up with many disappointed customers.

Even though Bluefin Solutions is listed has had somewhere between 200 employees, its website traffic has dropped to less than 10,000 page views in March of 2019, and they are an SAP consulting company on the decline.

Who is to Blame?

Those within Bluefin Solutions that we have spoken with primarily blame the “incompetent Indian management” of Mindtree for their decline and that the Mindtree management does not understand the SAP market.

However, the decline of HANA, which was the main item that differentiated Bluefin Solutions has also hurt. Not only did the HANA market level out, but the second implementation market that Bluefin Solutions had intended to leverage their HANA media prominence to enter, S/4HANA, never materialized.

“Our S/4HANA team has certified SAP HANA specialists across 33 countries including SAP Mentors and HANA Distinguished Engineers. We are SAP’s preferred implementation partner in the S/4HANA space and are fast becoming the leading S/4HANA subject matter expert and S/4HANA delivery partner in the market.”

The quotations on Bluefin Solutions’ website, even in 2019, are odd. Bluefin is a company of roughly 200 people; however, they claim HANA specialists in 33 countries. If there were an average of 3 HANA specialists per country, this would amount to 99 HANA specialists in total.

Even though there are extremely few companies live on S/4HANA, Bluefin Solutions is also the “the leading S/4HANA subject matter expert.” Consulting firms are not entirely composed of consultants. They have salespeople, administrative staff, etc.. Bluefin Solutions’ statements would mean that they would rapidly run out of consultants.

Here are the solutions where Bluefin Solutions claims expertise.

• BI/BW
• Enterprise Performance Management
• S/4HANA
• Travel and Expense Management
• Leonardo
• C/4HANA
• Fiori and SAPUI5
• SAP Cloud Platform
• SAP Managed Services

Bluefin Solutions continues to distribute false information about HANA with or without Appleby. Notice that this service offering page describes a solution that is still being developed, which is made up of acquisitions. But as we covered in the article How Accurate Was Bluefin Solutions on C4HANA?

C/4HANA is still being developed and made up of the following solutions.

“In a press release today SAP stated: “Following the completed acquisitions of market leaders Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud, SAP now ties together solutions to support all front-office functions, such as consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.””

Yet Bluefin Solutions wrote an article about C/4 as a functioning product right after it was acquired. Does Bluefin Solutions have resources in Hybris, CallidusCloud, and Gigya? Again, how are all these various areas of expertise fitting into the number of consultants that Bluefin Solutions has?

Conclusion

It looks incredibly likely that Appleby was particularly motivated to exaggerate HANA’s capabilities and Bluefin Solutions’ HANA practice due to an impending acquisition by some company (the winner being Mindtree).

Now here is where the ethical determination comes in.

Mindtree is just another in the bottom-feeding and unethical Indian consulting companies. Therefore was it wrong for John Appleby to exaggerate HANA to get a better price for Bluefin Solutions? 

When I found out that the acquiring company was MindTree, I chuckled. Is it wrong to lie if you are stealing from an Indian consulting company? Mindtree, just like Infosys, Wipro, TATA, and the rest, is scamming the H1-B program and offer the most atrocious consulting performance. In my view, Indian consulting companies should be stripped of their business license. The best thing for US domestic employees and US companies is if all the Indian consulting companies went out of business and many of the local consulting companies. Therefore, on balance, I have to applaud what Appleby did – to the degree that we were able to shive Mindtree.

As for the second factor, there are repeated cases where Appleby lists customers doing things with HANA that don’t make any match up with our research into HANA. These cases seem to demonstrate Bluefin Solutions standing up massive HANA instances, almost as if they have no limit to their budgets. Brightwork Research & Analysis has performed more research on HANA than any other entity, and we find it highly unlikely that Appleby and Bluefin Solutions were doing what they claimed with HANA.