Apotheker right hand man Wohl exits HP

So true

At one time I worked in the music industry - or the "record industry" as we called it at the time, since that's what we made. It was a large, well-known, international record label group. There was this nasty business of "promotion", involving just that bit of cocaine, hookers, etc., that had gotten the industry into hot water some years before. So they set up instead this network of "independent promoters," who were paid literally millions of dollars to do the same thing, to get the music played on the radio, and to get rack space in the retail outlets, only they were "consultants" instead of a division of the company, and these funds were kept in an intricate system of off-the-books accounting.

Which is a long roundabout way of saying that SAP never directly does these installations, they always work through consultants, and they're always the high-end guys like PWC, Deloitte, Bain, who at the time that my company (this is a different company now, in the fashion industry) implemented SAP were certainly high rollers in the entertainment end of things. I'm not saying drugs 'n ho's, but I am saying that there were lots of dinners and drinks and god knows what else going on. But you don't have consultants whose hobbies include flying his own helicopter on the cheap, that's for sure. And it was the customer paying for all of it.

In the end, was it worth it? The idea of consolidating into a single business data platform only has merit if you move the entire business - all of its departmental systems - into that platform. Which almost no one does. The development of the "hooks" to all the other operational systems is what most of these consultants were doing. It creates a horrendous budget, millions of dollars to implement, and the end delivery almost never shows a real reduction in outlay for IT expenses, which is the entire justification for any SAP implementation.

Yes, that's just one man's opinion, but it comes from my own direct experience in an SAP implementation project. Not a pretty picture. That HP wanted to reinvent itself along those lines - more than a decade after the heyday of most such undertakings - paints HP's board the fool more even than Apotheker. They were snowed. Hopefully they have awakened now, and will not let the same thing happen again.