What Will Happen to HANA Projects That Are In Process?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • We covered how SAP fired several top people in the HANA hierarchy.
  • So now, the question is, what happens to HANA projects that are in process.

Introduction

In the article SAP’s Layoffs and a Brightwork Warning on HANA, we covered what SAP’s layoffs meant for HANA. And it is not positive. However, it brings up an interesting question about what to do about planned HANA implementations.

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 Background

“Bernd Leukert is gone. Bjorn Goerke is gone. Ken Tsai, who had global product marketing responsibilities for HANA, SAP Data Hub, SAP Vora, is now vice president of Adobe’s Experience platform. All of Bjorn’s product teams are slaughtered: ABAP, HANA, UI, JAM, Big data, Mobile and many more. Not just Neo, but any SAP proprietary service on any platform. Everything related to Cloud Platform & Mobile in North America was shuttered – several teams across several cities. Didn’t matter how old/young, good/bad. Layoffs announced in the US, India, Japan, Hungary, Germany, Singapore, Canada, UK, China, Ireland, Malaysia, France, and Vietnam. SAP’s engineering culture died this week. – Ahmed Azmi

The Question

These high profile firings clearly mean something is wrong and SAP can no longer move forward with the current product leadership. You explained the reasons for the problems. What do you think SAP’s options going forward could be especially for customers who are currently implementing a HANA based system? SAP already removed HANA from the cloud platform a couple of years ago when they rebranded the HANA cloud platform (HCP) to the SAP cloud platform (SCP). Now, it looks like the on-premises product line is also taking a turn away from HANA.” – Ahmed Azmi

The Answer

“SAP is not going to change its strategy for in-process HANA customers, no matter how bad the value is for them. SAP can command many thousands of consulting firms to continue to promote HANA, none of them caring much what is true. I see them as continuing down the path they have followed of making false claims about HANA to anyone who will listen. But to your specific question, if a customer is in process, there is little that can normally be done. The IT department needs to pretend to the business that the purchase was justified. The number of IT departments that have admitted they ever made a mistake since the dawn of the computing age until two minutes ago still sits at about zero.”

And this brought up a question by Sam Bayer of Covisint.

“Actually incumbent CIOs never admit that they made a bad decision. Their successors get to proclaim that as they dance on the grave of their predecessor.”

To which we replied.

“Excellent point. This puts IT departments outside of the simply measurable realm. Basically the only time you hear about the details is when a customer files a lawsuit, and then, in that case, the fault is entirely with the consulting firm/vendor. Then the consulting firm/vendor says the fault lies entirely with the customer. This system, combined with where reviews are rigged on G2Crowd as we covered in the article Why G2Crowd Has False Information on S4HANA and Gartner as we covered in How Gartner is Similar to the Devil Wears Prada means that information about failures or limitations almost entirely come from personal connections. What I know about HANA is not public, it is because of people reaching out, but not high-level people, they are too far in The Matrix, rather I am contacted by those doing the work that have the unrealistic expectations placed upon them from their managers. The industry lacks any type of quality control. At many vendors, this is less of a problem because they do their own quality control, but at a vendor like SAP that constantly releases immature products, it a serious problem. As an example, I was recently contacted about a need for 4 EWM consultants from Deloitte. EWM is a dead application that has failed everywhere it has been attempted. But Deloitte is pitching it anyway, because their SAP consulting practice can only recommend SAP. That implementation is destined to fail before it begins.”