Expanding Section: SAP’s Claims Around S/4HANA

Frequently the claim will use a statistic regarding the success of an application. SAP will often have the word “number of customers” that it has. SAP has also taken this approach this with HANA and S/4HANA.

SAP has announced roughly 500 new “customers” every quarter for S/4HANA. SAP will often follow the statement about the customer numbers with something quite optimistic about how the software is transforming the way their customers are doing XYZ. This again was stated in the 2017 Q1 analysts call.

“Driven by S/4HANA, our core innovations are growing really fast with software licenses up 13%. We now have more than 5,800 S/4HANA customers with global companies like Energy SE, choosing S/4 in the first quarter. Big brands like Citrix Systems selected S/4 cloud edition, the leading intelligent cloud ERP solution in the market by far.” – Bill McDermott, SAP

“Were we happy or disappointed with 400? I think the bigger topic is we have 5,800. We have a snowballing effect now that on the go-live customers and we have more and more projects ongoing that are more complete than just finance and logistics, so it’s really a very, very good story for all of SAP.” – Ron Enslin, SAP

This is covered in the article How SAP Mislead Analyst Q1 2017 Earnings Call.

One of the peculiar things about S/4HANA has been the discrepancy between the number of “customers,” or companies that own S/4HANA versus the number of companies that are live on S/4HANA. And understanding this means getting into what the definition of a customer is to a software vendor.

SAP continues to show consistent growth in customers for S/4HANA (image from UpperEdge — https://upperedge.com/sap/migrating-to-sap-s-4hana-could-get-you-fired-not-deciding-on-s-4hana-will-probably-get-you-fired/)