How SAP Won a Fake IoT Award

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • About the Award
  • Who is the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards?
  • The IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards?
  • Who is Reporting on the IoT Awards

Introduction

It was recently called out that SAP won an award for IoT. In this article, we analyze the validity of this award.

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. 

About the Award

Ass supposedly bestowed upon SA. The award was for IoT Leadership and “IoT CEO of the Year.” The specific recipient was Dr. Tanja Rueckert.

The entity bestowing this award is called the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards.

Who is the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards?

One early seam in the storyline is the name of the bestowing entity. This is because media entities usually give awards. It is highly unusual for the award-bestowing entity to have no other reason for existing other than award bestowal. On the About page of the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards, it states exactly that.

“The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the creativity, hard work and success of IoT companies, technologies and products. IoT Breakthrough winners receive well-deserved recognition and third-party validation from an independent organization. Winners are publicly announced in early January, helping companies start 2018 out with a bang! The winners will be announced and listed on the IoT Breakthrough Awards website, and winners have the opportunity to tout their awards at tradeshows, through news releases to key media and journalists, on their own websites, social media, product packaging and print materials and more!”

The description states very clearly that the awards’ point is to be promotional, that is, to “help the companies start 2018 with a bang!” As the entity seems to have no other way of making income, it is quite likely that IoT Breakthrough Awards is either a consortium of IoT vendors that want to give themselves awards, or they are owned by an independent entity that charges the vendors that it bestows the awards upon.

The IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards?

Having never heard of this entity before, we checked their Google statistics. The volume of the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards is so small that there is no measurement from the volume measurement site that we use. This looks quite fishy, and it lends more credence to the idea that the IoT Breakthrough of the Year Awards is a fabricated website.

Who is Reporting on the IoT Awards

The link about SAP winning this award came to us through the website Temboo. The emphasis of the article was highlighting women in IoT. The amount of fiddle faddle on this website is apparent from the following quote.

“Tanja mentioned that she believes strongly in digital transformation (key for IoT and digital supply chain) because it requires collaboration and she believes that women leaders can truly make a difference by making relationships and collaboration successful, thereby increasing the economic and societal impact of digital transformation.”

Here again, we have the constant usage of the manufactured term, “digital transformation.” However, the question is, where did Temboo find out about this award? The link on the website took us to a problematic source called, MarketInsider.com. Market Insider is a site that distributes PR Releases. In fact, this article announcing the awards was sourced from the PR Newswire. The PR Newswire is a service that pushes announcements. The marketing departments of companies entirely write the articles that flow through PR Newswire. We checked other sites that carried this story, and we found PRWeb.com. Again this is another outlet for PR stories.

Temboo placed this article in their article without even elementary checking to see that the source is a PR mill. PR mills push out an unending stream of false information, which is why they are not considered a source of information for anything but media criticism.

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Conclusion

The IoT Breakthrough, the Year Awards, is a fake website that was set up to give awards to members of the consortium or charge them for winning awards. The awards rely upon the reader not doing any investigation and taking the awards at face value. SAP has consistently provided false information to Leonardo’s market, their IoT solution that we have chronicled in other articles. The IoT Breakthrough, the Year Awards, is just another example of this.