SAP and Customer Value
November 8, 2008
When a company turns to its customers to help explain customer value, my pin feathers twitch. I read this news release, which appeared on a Forbes Magazine Web site here. The wording of the news release struck me as peculiar. I did not find a reference to search, which is not surprising. TREX is not given much visibility in my opinion. What SAP said was:
- Nine years of support
- 5-1-2 support to five years
- A 7-2 offering, which is in my opinion babble.
Translating this to value, in my opinion, is more support without charging the customer any more money, maybe. My recollection is that SAP raised its prices and customers complained. So instead of lower prices, a customer gets more support, in one case nine years.
Will SAP be an independent company in nine years? Will these customers be in business in nine years? No one knows, so extending service terms does not deliver customer value. This type of word smithing does not change the fact that expensive, complex, and customized on premises solutions are starting to show stress fractures.
SAP strikes me as an enterprise software company that has caught the Yahoo flu?
Stephen Arnold, November 8, 2008
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