Expansion Section: Published Studies on S/4HANA Implementations

The 350 number is from ASUG and their 2016 survey which was critiqued by Brightwork in an article entitled Analysis of ASUG’s SAP HANA Adoption Survey . This survey was published a year ago, from the publication of this research paper you are reading, so ASUG’s 2017 survey will be higher. But in our review of ASUG’s media output on a variety of topics, it is clear that ASUG has transitioned from being a user group to be just another outlet through which SAP distributes press releases. In fact, while ASUG authors are attached to articles, it is not clear that ASUG authors are even writing the articles attributed to them. If ASUG is actively promoting S/4HANA and SAP generally, then ASUG cannot produce any research in the field. Biased sources lead to biased research results. ASUG spends time in their study describing their methodology. However, as with Gartner or Forrester, if the research entity takes money from those it is researching, the methodology does not matter. This is an extremely well-understood topic in academic research. But is a problem in the enterprise software space because private industry is not setup very well to fund research that is truly independent. For this reason, whatever ASUG’s estimate, the real number is considerably lower. Brightwork developed an estimate of S/4HANA implementations which is lower than the commonly presented estimates. Unsurprisingly, the Brightwork estimates differ greatly from an organization like ASUG that is highly intertwined with SAP. Now that we have set the table with pertinent information that is necessary to know in order to interpret the study, we will move into the study itself.

Expanding Section: What is the Definition of a Software Customer?

Unknown to many who follow software vendors, being a "customer" only means that the customer is in possession of a license for S/4HANA. Now in many cases, the number of customers that have a license of something means more than what it does with S/4HANA. However, with S/4HANA SAP has engineered these numbers in order to exaggerate the impression of adoptions for S/4HANA. This topic is covered in detail in How SAP Controls Perceptions with Customer Numbers . In this way, software companies can, if they choose, exaggerate this number in the way that a company that produces a physical product cannot. Companies have always employed techniques to seem more successful than they are. End of quarter pushes, which provide promotions and incentives are quite common. Yet this is an important distinction between software companies and companies that make physical products. For companies that make physical products, they incur a far higher cost to exaggerate sales. If for instance, General Motors were to attempt to inflate its customer numbers this way, it would have to ship more cars to customers for free -- incurring a large loss for every car is "sold" this way. The software has a very low incremental cost, therefore software companies don’t incur these same costs. Important things to know about these licenses are the following: Many of these licenses were transitioned from SAP to customers at no cost. S4 was free from February 3, 2015, to December 31, 2015. End 2015 SAP claimed 2,700 S4 customers that obviously signed because it was free. In the promotion customers only need to buy HANA for 15% of the S4 modules. SAP has offered S/4HANA at a very reduced price to SAP consulting partners. Several of these SAP consulting partners are profiled as case studies in this paper. When S4 was announced in Feb 2015, SAP stops disclosing the number of customers of Business Suite on HANA, at the end 2014 the number was 1,850 customers. Then just once on April 6, 2016, SAP said, 2,500 customers, Business Suite on HANA. What happened with those customers? How many went live? SAP has been bringing what Brightwork refers to as Type 2 indirect access claims against its customers. In order to negotiate away an indirect access claim, S/4HANA is one of the most preferred applications put in front of customers to purchase. 2,700 is 50% of the number of S/4HANA licenses claimed end of 2016 = 5,400, so half were free. One can fairly say the promotion motivated to sign not necessarily having the intention to implement anytime soon. The final bullet is supported by the Brightwork article How SAP Controls Perceptions with Customer Numbers.

Expanding Section: SAP's Claims Around S/4HANA

Frequently the claim will use a statistic regarding the success of an application. SAP will often have the word “number of customers” that it has. SAP has also taken this approach this with HANA and S/4HANA. SAP has announced roughly 500 new "customers" every quarter for S/4HANA. SAP will often follow the statement about the customer numbers with something quite optimistic about how the software is transforming the way their customers are doing XYZ. This again was stated in the 2017 Q1 analysts call. “Driven by S/4HANA, our core innovations are growing really fast with software licenses up 13%. We now have more than 5,800 S/4HANA customers with global companies like Energy SE, choosing S/4 in the first quarter. Big brands like Citrix Systems selected S/4 cloud edition, the leading intelligent cloud ERP solution in the market by far." – Bill McDermott, SAP “Were we happy or disappointed with 400? I think the bigger topic is we have 5,800. We have a snowballing effect now that on the go-live customers and we have more and more projects ongoing that are more complete than just finance and logistics, so it's really a very, very good story for all of SAP.” – Ron Enslin, SAP This is covered in the article How SAP Mislead Analyst Q1 2017 Earnings Call. One of the peculiar things about S/4HANA has been the discrepancy between the number of "customers," or companies that own S/4HANA versus the number of companies that are live on S/4HANA. And understanding this means getting into what the definition of a customer is to a software vendor. SAP continues to show consistent growth in customers for S/4HANA (image from UpperEdge -- https://upperedge.com/sap/migrating-to-sap-s-4hana-could-get-you-fired-not-deciding-on-s-4hana-will-probably-get-you-fired/)

Search Results for: hana

IT Consultants

Can SAP Resources Determine if Something is True Through Belief in SAP?
ByPrimary Researcher June 8, 2019March 24, 2021

… article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.
Go to top
Can Truth Come from Blind Belief?
The following statement was provided by Mohamed Judi, who, at the time of this comment, worked for SAP. He was asked to support his claims regarding our analysis and critique of SAP HANA.
This was our comment to him. The most interesting part was his response.
“I have confronted this author with an article responding to it, and Barbel has refused to answer any of the comments. If you are interested you can see this link.
Notice from the comment that Barbel …

Read More Can SAP Resources Determine if Something is True Through Belief in SAP?
IT Consultants

Is it True that SAP Consultants and Employees Cannot be Biased?
ByPrimary Researcher June 8, 2019March 24, 2021

… but I’m not claiming to be an independent market analyst so the argument of being bias or not applies to Brightwork Research employees, and other market analysts, more than myself.”
– Mohamed Judi
It is the position of Brightwork that SAP has been providing false information to the market about HANA since HANA was introduced. Mohamed is paid by SAP and therefore
has a direct financial bias to distribute information that our conclusion is incorrect. That fact that SAP is not an independent analysis does not mean that Mohamed can play the bias card against Brightwork. Furthermore, bias does not …

Read More Is it True that SAP Consultants and Employees Cannot be Biased?
SAP Deception

Are Brightwork's Statements Too General Versus SAP?
ByPrimary Researcher June 8, 2019March 14, 2021

… to their readers.

Are Brightwork’s Statements to General?
This following statement was provided by Mohamed Judi, who, at the time of this comment, worked for SAP.
“Also, as you know, in technology, it is important to be specific and not make general comments like “the cost of SAP is more than others” or “the performance is bad” or “most customers are ditching SAP”.” – Mohamed Judi
Our Response
I don’t see how our statements are more general than people that work at SAP.
Vishal Sikka stated that HANA would help cure cancer because genetic algorithms would run from within

Read More Are Brightwork's Statements Too General Versus SAP?
SAP Highlights & Assessments

The S/4HANA Implementation Sales Intelligence Highlights
ByPrimary Researcher June 7, 2019March 25, 2021

Find Out the Reality on S/4HANA
You have found the only realistic information available about S/4HANA. This research is critical competitive intelligence that will help you in your campaign against S/4HANA.
This study includes the following:

The background on S/4HANA implementation history.
Evaluation of 240 S/4HANA implementation case studies classified by customer size and fit to industry. The studies can be filtered and searched to help you identify cases most relevant to your interests.
Explanation around how S/4HANA and HANA work, both the official and the real story.
Actionable insights into what customer characteristics …

Read More The S/4HANA Implementation Sales Intelligence Highlights
SAP Litigation 2

National Grid's Explanation of Wipro's Consultant Quality
ByPrimary Researcher June 4, 2019April 21, 2023

… examples are the APO optimizer, as we covered in the article The Problem with the SAP Optimizer and Flow Control. As we covered in the article, the dynamic safety stock The Experiences with Problems with the Dynamic Safety Stock, and the best fit in DP in Replacing Best Fit in SAP DP. HANA does not meet any of the sales statements about it, as we covered in the article How to Interpret False Information on SAP HANA. That is, this functionality output values, but the values are useless. SAP consultants typically respond to my comments about software functionality not …

Read More National Grid's Explanation of Wipro's Consultant Quality
SAP Litigation 2

How to Understand Wipro's Position on Lying
ByPrimary Researcher June 3, 2019January 24, 2024

… what they used to make much of Oracle doing). They have their IaaS partnerships. They have a useless HEC cloud… A mess.
HANA is a complete money grab and the opposite of what people want in software. Everyone else is going SaaS where the software company includes and manages the database (even Oracle, the database company). SAP decided that people want to pay millions upon millions to flip out a mature database with an immature database and then manage it.”

Read More How to Understand Wipro's Position on Lying
Oracle Database

What Percentage of Oracle Customers are on What Oracle Database Version?
ByPrimary Researcher June 1, 2019October 21, 2023

… Our observation is that the Oracle database has become overly bloated in its most recent versions. Most companies do not need the extra functionality or the extra bloat and expense involved with Oracle 12c. For example, Oracle 12c adds a column store, which was put in place to combat SAP HANA, but which there is little use for in the database, as we covered in the article How Accurate with Bloor Research on Oracle In-Memory?
Implications of the Slow or Stunted Migration
The evidence is that a minority of customers have shown any interest in migrating to Oracle 12c …

Read More What Percentage of Oracle Customers are on What Oracle Database Version?
Expansion Section: Published Studies on S/4HANA Implementations
ByPrimary Researcher May 29, 2019

The 350 number is from ASUG and their 2016 survey which was critiqued by Brightwork in an article entitled Analysis of ASUG’s SAP HANA Adoption Survey. This survey was published a year ago, from the publication of this research paper you are reading, so ASUG’s 2017 survey will be higher. But in our review of ASUG’s media output on a variety of topics, it is clear that ASUG has transitioned from being a user group to be just another outlet through which SAP distributes press releases. In fact, while ASUG authors are attached to articles, it is …

Read More Expansion Section: Published Studies on S/4HANA Implementations
Expanding Section: What is the Definition of a Software Customer?
ByPrimary Researcher May 29, 2019

A Expanding Section: What is the Definition of a Software Customer? Posted on May 29, 2019 Unknown to many who follow software vendors, being a “customer” only means that the customer is in possession of a license for S/4HANA. Now in many cases, the number of customers that have a license of something means more…

Read More Expanding Section: What is the Definition of a Software Customer?
Expanding Section: SAP’s Claims Around S/4HANA
ByPrimary Researcher May 29, 2019

A Expanding Section: SAP’s Claims Around S/4HANA Posted on May 29, 2019 Frequently the claim will use a statistic regarding the success of an application. SAP will often have the word “number of customers” that it has. SAP has also taken this approach this with HANA and S/4HANA. SAP has announced roughly 500 new “customers”…

Read More Expanding Section: SAP’s Claims Around S/4HANA

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