As with previous books, I have been excerpting 10% of the contents. You can buy the book at several stores (online in paperback at CreateSpace and ebook at Amazon).
2.0 looks at the prospects of S/4HANA which SAP launched in February of this year. Chapter 5 revisits over 10 pages the model of the SAP economy I had developed for book 1.
I adjusted the model to project for the potential impact of Fiori, HANA and newer SAP acquisitions. The major adjustments are
- As in previous upgrade cycles, there is often a shortage of qualified partner resources with customers having to pay premiums for such support. Often they end up using SAP’s even more premium-priced consultants.
- At its Global Partner Summit in June 2(115, SAP shared that it had 13,000 partners worldwide. While many surely have a relatively small number of consulting staff (compared to a partner like Accenture), I have added an average of 25 staff for 12,500 of those partners I did not previously have in the model. SAP had provided feedback on the model but chose not to disclose I had underestimated that count.
- With the growing sprawl in the SAP product portfolio, I am seeing more customers invest in master data management middleware and other internal projects with related staff. They are also having to invest in duplicate IT staff as they transition to HANA and Fiori while continuing to invest in existing technologies.
- In the model in “SAP Nation,” I did not have Concur customers as the acquisition had only recently closed.
- I added a new line for ‘end users,” using the assumption above that 30 million users will each need 20 hours of training a year.
I could have added much larger end-user costs growing costs of non-human users like smart meters, and amortization costs but let me repeat my guiding thought during SAP Nation:
What’s the point of presenting an even gloomier model? The revised model already puts the GDP of SAP Nation at over $300 billion a year—close to that of Israel.
