You have heard the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. But if you get fooled 6-7-8 times, who do you blame?
As I go through every nook and crevice of the SAP economy for the book I am writing, it is staggering how every type of vendor has premium priced – over and over. Of course you get the usual validation – oh, it comes with better SLAs, responsiveness, Q0S etc etc.
a) SAP has made a habit of charging in different ways for “adjacencies” or repackaged functionality customers have previously paid for
b) Consultants brag about having done thousands of SAP projects, then expect a premium for that experience, when they should be passing along economies of scale and repetition
c) Consultant travel continues at staggering levels even as telepresence has improved and many project phases should be done in “factories” not at client sites
d) Indian vendors who proudly delivered continuous improvements via their CMM Level 5 and Six Sigma programs on legacy and even arcane vertical apps, seem to have forgotten that in their SAP customers
e) Any one with a credit card can buy cloud storage from Amazon at 3c a gb a month. SAP hosting partners charge 10-20-30X.
f) MPLS pricing for networks into centralized SAP sites continues to be shockingly high. Rates of $ 100 to 200 per mbps, when you and I as consumers pay $ 1-5 per month. Hey but it’s more reliable.
g) HANA hardware, being memory intensive and only certified from a handful of vendors, is off the charts compared to other server pricing.
Like I said, most customers have good validations for the spend but looking at it from the wide set of data points I have collected, you have to wonder how many of them realized they were buying a car would need premium fuel, and yet deliver low MPG, need $ 100 oil changes and $ 1,000 tires and and …
