How Accurate Was SAP on Integrated Suite Offers a Lower TCO?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • What SAP said about SAP’s integrated suite offers a lower TCO.
  • The truth About SAP’s integrated suite and a lower TCO?

What SAP Said About SAP’s Integrated Suite Offers a Lower TCO

What is now mostly forgotten is that SAP marketed its ERP system because it would be the last system that a customer would need to purchase. This was a story that was presented beginning back in the 1980s. The concept was that companies that had mostly custom developed their systems could lower their maintenance and integration overhead by using a “single system,” which would be the ERP system. This would allow a company to use a “single system,” which would lead to a significant simplification of the IT landscape with associated cost savings. All of this was stated by SAP and their consulting partners as a pathway to lower TCO. You will find out how accurate this claim turned out to be.

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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 Truth About SAP’s Integrated Suite and a Lower TCO?

As covered in the article, The Fallacy of the Benefits of the Integrated Suite, SAP and its partners offered deceptions in multiple directions to customers.

  1. While R/3 – ERP was integrated into that all the modules sat on the same database, the new products introduced by SAP (BW, APO, etc..) have not anymore integrated into many cases than best of breed applications connected to SAP.
  2. Legacy systems often did not go away; therefore, SAP ERP still had to be integrated into them.
  3. SAP proved very expensive to integrate to, being one of the only applications in the market that could not connect tables directly but instead forced companies to go through old things called IDOCs.
  4. Integration is not a primary driver of TCO. SAP and their consulting partners pushed to overestimate the cost of integration for no other reason than it helped push more money to SAP and their consulting partners.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for SAP’s integrated suite lowering TCO.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.