The title of this post is a riff off Bruce Richardson's post SAP 3Q Results: Too conservative for its own good.
Reading it, I asked what a CIO or another buyer reader could take away from that piece. Really not much - it's aimed at investors and vendors. No tough questions on whether SAP's planned maintenance will stick? Their executive turnover? Their position on SaaS and clouds? Forget internal IT - what about spend on R&D in a recession?
Bruce is the most knowledgeable human being when it comes to SAP and other ERP vendors (that includes the population of industry analysts, financial analysts, consultants, bloggers who watch/work with SAP and 99.99% of SAP itself). And if you have the pleasure of talking to him or meeting him, he will give you his honest, historical and hysterical (he has many a bar story) views on any vendor.
But when it comes to published materials, their stuff is often soft. And makes it way into vendor marketing materials. If they say negative stuff, vendors typically lobby, coerce and worse. Here's the reality - the biggest customers of every industry analyst firm are vendors. Even the so-called buyer centric firms like Gartner and Forrester.
So here's my 2c - ignore what analysts say in print. Schedule a call. Or even better schedule a visit and get them to talk without attribution.
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