Why Do SAP S/4HANA Customers Have to Sign an NDA? - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

SAP makes S/4HANA customers sign NDAs.
What does this say about the maturity and quality of S/4HANA?

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.

The Quote on How Much S/4HANA Failures are Published

But to be fair – this is the case for all embarrassing things both companies and persons does. We all tend to exaggerate the good things we do and not talk about the bad things.”

Our Response

The comment about observing data points, is generally true. However, in this case, I don’t think it applies very well. I know of many failed S/4HANA implementations that never became public. People within those companies reached out to me. The Under Armour situation is far worse than reported — and is being covered up by IT. So the problems with S/4HANA are suppressed, not exaggerated. IT departments routinely suppress their failures. I can walk into any SAP account and find large numbers of applications that are not working as advertised or just on zombie servers, and it is in secret. And there is something else. Customers sign NDAs when they implement S/4HANA. This is very odd, and the question is why. The only conclusion I can come to is that SAP knew the issues they would have with S/4HANA and needed to put a muzzle on their customers.

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Conclusion

This should be a good lesson for customers of SAP or other vendors. If a vendor asks you to sign an NDA as part of purchasing an application, this is an indicator that the application is highly problematic. As soon as an NDA is part of a software purchase, this is a good indicator that you should pass on the application. No vendor should ever submit an NDA to a customer as part of an application purchase.