Bill McDermott is a great salesman. He wows audiences at prospects. And it is showing in SAP sales performance. Of course, the PeopleSoft Oracle battle and now digestion de-focus has helped.
Ideally he should have done a stint at Accenture before he came to SAP (he was at Siebel, Gartner, Xerox before SAP) because SAP is selling its own consulting services aggressively. I am not convinced SAP can do change management, program management, process re-design, testing and many other steps in a typical ERP project well. It is not stopping them from promising to do so.
They are also trying to get pricing back to the go-go late 1990 levels. This in a world where contactors have more reasonable expectations and offshore vendors are priced at a third to a quarter of rates. When asked about offshore rates, SAP has been known to say “our services are somewhat immature – not sure we can do that”. At a client where they were negotiated to more reasonable rates – imagine – an SAP consultant recently told a client “You paid B team rates – why do you expect A team performance?”
In the 1990s SAP let its implementation partners get out of hand. This time around it may itself lead its services ecosystem to over-heat status.
