Should Oracle Create the Larry Ellison Institute to Counter the Hasso Plattner Institute?

Executive Summary

  • The Hasso Plattner Institute is routinely used to support SAP’s marketing contentions.
  • How valid is the concept of vendor-controlled institutes on university campuses?

Video Introduction: Should Oracle Create the Larry Ellison Institute to Counter the Hasso Plattner Institute?

Text Introduction (Skip if You Watched the Video)

Hasso Plattner created the Hasso Plattner Institute years ago at the University of Potsdam in Germany. He is now a “professor of computer science” even though he has no degrees in computer science through this institute. He also has a fake or honorary Ph.D. from the University of Potsdam. This means that the University of Potsdam is one of the world’s only universities to have a professor “working” there whose Ph.D. is honorary. In the article How Accurate Was Hasso Plattner About SAP HANA Publications? We pointed out that Hasso Plattner has moved on to what appears to be the final stage of academic falsification by pointing to fictitious peer-reviewed research to support various contentions around HANA that his Hasso Plattner Institute reviewed. You will learn how SAP enabled Hasso Plattner to falsify his academic credentials.

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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. 

Hasso claimed that 200+ peer-reviewed publications supported the statistics and assertions made in this slide. 

How Oracle Can Copy the HPI with the Larry Ellison Institute

What is the point of an entity connected to an academic institution used to generate PR and marketing support for a software vendor? What I recommend is that Larry Ellison starts up the Larry Ellison Institute (LEI). With enough money, Larry Ellison can also become a professor of computer science. He can then refer to fictitious 200+ peer-reviewed studies about the autonomous database and 200+ peer-reviewed studies on how you can cut your AWS costs in half if you use Oracle, as we covered in Calling Total BS on Oracle’s “Cut Your AWS Bill in Half”​ Guarantee.

The HPI is a degree-conferring entity (the University of Potsdam confers the degree as they have the charter) that can only publish research that supports SAP’s marketing contentions. AWS can then start up the Jeff Besoz Institute (JBI) that says Larry Ellison is wrong…..and so on. We could have a conflicted “institute” for every significant entity in software, all pretending to be part of the academic system, all pointing to fictitious research.

Theranos and Faking Peer-Reviewed Studies

Here is the published paper that describes how the Theranos blood testing machine worked.

Notice that the paper is focused on a product rather than performing a test. This paper is a fraud.

Look at all of those parts! Theranos spent 13 years and $900 million on private investment on a machine that any person well versed in the topic of blood diagnostics could have known would not work before the company was started. But with a failing machine, Theranos needed some academic type of authority. And hence this paper was published. Elizabeth Holmes and those that wrote this study knew that it was a misrepresentation, but they went ahead and published it and then referred to it later. 

The blood machine never worked, but this paper was repeatedly referred to by Theranos to investors and the press. I believe this journal where the article was published is a journal posing as an academic journal and will publish anything for money.

Some journals act as parasites on the academic publication system by pretending to be part of the system.

Conclusion

Financial conflicts ruin research. The more software vendors that create institutes associated with universities, the less reliable will be the information produced by the university system. Medical research experiences have clearly demonstrated that corporate funding of education and research is entirely corrosive to objectivity. We now have a medical system in the US that is, in great part, controlled by pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers.