SAP made a mistake on its own blog - mobile platform to survive

adopting a product your vendor actually cares about

The Farce is strong in this one!

SAP (like all other large software firms) have a business model built on forcing their customers to either pay extortionate "maintenance" fees, or upgrading to today's product. And then tomorrow's. And then the day after tomorrow's <insert your own joke here>. The largely negative and costly implications for customers don't matter. If anything, it's a driver of further consultancy and implementation fees.

And the reason that SAP's customers got themselves in this perpetual bind is that they think that they are energy companies, communications companies, airlines, and so forth, and thus that IT is an enabler, and an inconvenient commodity enabler, best outsourced. And that's where they are wrong - all of these businesses, and many more are these days IT and data companies first, who happen to have an energy trading division, or a communications network, or operate (mostly) leased aircraft through third party maintainers. But because they've made that colossal mistake of see their IT as a mere evil necessity, they've gifted huge control over their future, their current performance, their processes to another company without even thinking, and are now beholden to it. No longer having the in-house capability, the courage or drive to build their own core business systems, these companies are ERP ring wraiths, neither living nor dead, eternally bound to the will of the one ERP company that they originally chose.

And that's why the large software companies are so valuable, so cash rich, so slobbishly complacent, so lacking in real customer focus , because the costs and uncertainties of change are too high for their customers to contemplate.

Paid over 6.4B for Mobile data management and unwired platform from Sybase! John Chen laughing all the way to the bank! Now SAP makes another big mistake with CaulidusCloud.