How to Sue SAP and Oracle and Consulting Firms
Executive Summary
- SAP and Oracle and SAP and Oracle consulting firms provide a large amount of false information to their customers.
- Why suing SAP or Oracle and their consulting firms is a way to recover resources from projects based upon pretenses.
Introduction
It is difficult it is to get accurate information on enterprise software. There is significant censorship in enterprise software. In our long-term research into enterprise software, we rate SAP and Oracle as two of the least honest vendors (see our analysis at Honest Vendor Ratings – SAP and Honest Vendor Ratings – Oracle) — and provide false information to customers on a routine basis.
Enabled by Corrupt Consulting Firms
This false information is repeated by SAP and Oracle consulting firms that make no effort to fact-check claims by either vendor as their business model is to staff consultants to implement and manage the applications from each vendor. Many SAP customers make the mistake of assuming that a Deloitte or Accenture is independent of SAP and Oracle, when in fact, they function as sales arms of SAP and, in some cases, resell SAP software.
We have charted the inaccuracy of SAP and Oracle consulting firms and found it to be a simple replication of the accuracy of these vendors. That is, the consulting firms add no value in increasing accuracy to what SAP and Oracle propose. Most consulting firms bring no IP of their own to the table and serve as just passive repeaters of IP (often false) created by vendors.
As we cover in the article The Real Story on IT Implementation Methodologies, the implementation “methodologies” are not actual value add — but are reverse engineered from what the consulting firm happens to sell and are a type of “faux IP.” As we cover in the article How Accurate Was SAP About ASAP Methodology Speeding Implementations, like SAP’s ASAP methodology, they do not have the outcomes for projects that they claim.
SAP and Oracle Consulting Partnership Agreements
The partnership agreements that consulting firms sign with these vendors mean that they are not independent of these vendors even if they wanted to be (which they don’t). Their model is profit maximization, not representing the interests of their clients.
SAP and SAP consulting firms hide important information from prospects and sell applications and implementations based upon their revenue needs rather than customer needs. This explains why there is so much waste in the SAP market.
To add on to this, both IT analysts — like Gartner and Forrester — which receive large amounts of income from these vendors, as well as IT media outlets — which receive both advertising and paid placements from these vendors — do little to challenge these vendors and primarily serve as PR outfits for both these software vendors and other software vendors.
All of these entities serve to create an “echo chamber” where claims created by SAP and Oracle’s marketing and sales arms — which are often entirely false or enormous exaggerations of what is true, are repeated through virtually every entity in the enterprise software space that publishes information or speaks to customers about these vendors.
The Project Outcomes
With all of the false information communicated to customers, there is naturally a tremendous amount of waste on the projects of these vendors. This waste is, in most cases, covered up by IT departments, as we cover in the article To Whom Does Your IT Department Owe Its Allegiance?
IT departments have proven themselves to be easily captured by vendors. Curiously, we usually are more interested in the outcomes of projects than the IT departments that we advise in our advertisement business. That obviously should not be the case.
Typically the waste continues without much changing from year to year. The ecosystems for each vendor do an outstanding job of preventing this information from getting to customers. We repeatedly receive contacts from individuals on projects that state they cannot bring up the real issues on SAP projects, or they are targeted by senior IT leaders in their companies — who have been co-opted by both the vendor and the consulting firm. The following quotation from someone who reached out to us is instructive.
I saw the coming disaster when I got my hands on the test system the very first time. I stayed very vocal about basic design issues. My honesty was appreciated early on but now after a year of this.
I feel that my commentary is not well-liked within the company.
The Principle of Brightwork as Evidence-Based
Brightwork is based upon the principle of providing accurate information on SAP and other IT-related topics, no matter what the outcome and whether that information is “positive” or “negative.”
In our view, the information commonly available from both SAP and SAP surrogates (those that make money from SAP, Deloitte, Accenture, Gartner, Forrester) is of deficient quality. SAP and their proxies provide “negative information” all the time. It is both information designed to get companies to make decisions that are against their interests and information that is both false and designed to take business away from the competition.
Therefore, what is “positive” or “negative” is dependent upon one’s perspective. The “positive” declaration of one course of action is necessarily a negative statement towards other sources of action.
Suing SAP or Oracle and Their Consulting Firms
The need to sue SAP and Oracle is high. This is because the theft on SAP and Oracle and the aligned consulting firms is very high. However, companies generally don’t know how to do it — and much of the legal advice in the area is of questionable quality. As we cover in the article The Problem with the Judge’s Ruling on the SAP Diageo Case, we analyzed the court documents from the SAP v. Diageo case. We found that the attorneys for Diageo presented an argument to the court that did not technically make any sense.
How SAP and Oracle Function
Both vendors massively overstate what their software can do, and they tie the decision-makers in their customers into their web of lies. They get captured by accepting the lies. Then they often feel they can’t go back and expose the lies because now they reflect on them.
Issues with Finding Legal Representation
A primary problem with suing SAP or Oracle is that in most cases, a law firm is engaged by an SAP or Oracle customer, and the law firm does not know that much about either vendor. Typically, the attorneys “run the show,” which has the individuals with the domain expertise in how these vendors function as just bit players. The law firm finds the expert witnesses that support their client’s case, and then SAP has its expert witnesses that contradict the claims. With rates around $500 to $650 per hour, it is a simple matter to find expert witnesses with many credentials to support any view. Law firms are not research firms, and so they have to spend a great deal of time learning the domain. Few law firms accumulate many implementation lawsuits, so they generally start from square one in terms of their experience with these types of lawsuits. This is the time which they, of course, charge their clients for learning. Much of the work, particularly in the early stages, relates..
- Whether the vendor and/or the consulting firms made false statements to the customer.
- Whether the consulting firm comported itself in a way that was in line with industry standards.
These are not questions that attorneys can answer — as they have never worked on IT projects. Therefore, they must rely on their expert witnesses. The attorney skills come into play regarding the process of filing a lawsuit, which jurisdictions in which to file, etc.
This current design makes lawsuits extremely expensive. Of course, the price charged per hour by law firms that litigate in this area is a big part of why. It serves to dissuade SAP and Oracle customers with valid claims from bringing lawsuits.
How we Approach Determining the Case for a Lawsuit
We already have the research and have spent decades in the SAP space on projects and dealing with SAP entities. We have increased our Oracle knowledge in the past three years and have found many parallels between SAP and Oracle do business. Overall, we maintain one of the largest, if not the largest, research database for how SAP, Oracle, and their consulting companies deceive their customers.
A Different Approach
Our research conclusion is that SAP and Oracle and their associated consulting firms apply the same tactics globally.
- We know which applications work as intended and which have a large discrepancy between marketing and reality.
- We are also familiar with how the vendor-aligned consulting firms function.
- This allows us to “hit the ground running” in cases against these vendors and consulting firms and to provide guidance related to lawsuits, including rather than trying to use just the attorneys that work within a single law firm, to find the right attorneys for just the specific work that is required.
- This reduces the costs of suing SAP and increases the appropriateness of the attorneys used in the lawsuit.