I don’t want to make too big a deal of this, but i am frankly amazed that HP would choose to blame SAP for recent execution problems. Fair enough IT projects are often a lot harder than expected. But that doesn’t mean you have to call it out.
1. In Europe, at least, HP is currently having some success shipping Itanium servers to support SAP roillouts. Itanium is HP’s biggest bet, and it has just criticized its key ISV partner for getting this infrastructure to market.
2. HP is trying to build an application management business to rival IBMs. What better case study in proving your R/3 and Netweaver capability than a good old dogfood eating session–show everyone how to merge two SAP systems and they will come to you the next time they make a merger or acquisition and want to do the same thing. Who would go to HP now for a large scale SAP integration? The CEO just publicly said HP can’t effectively manage such a project.
3. The Adaptive Narrative—there are only two major vendors that use the terminology “Adaptive” – HP has the Adaptive Enterprise and SAP wants to run Adaptive Business. this is a great partner marketing opportunity. “Hey we deliver Adaptive together”. But now, from SAP’s pespective–why work closely to help HP corporate comms, when HP is evidently so willing to criticize when times are tough. Note the comparison – there was a time when IBM’s sales force had some issues with a Siebel rollout. But the world at large never heard a thing. IBM wasn’t about to criticize its most important CRM partner in public. Well HP just did exactly that.
You can bet IBM has some executives in Walldorf right now discussing joint opportunities.
Very surprising – its bad enough blaming competitors for missteps – but partners? Oh well – like i say, i don’t want to dwell on it. there are plenty of other sharp knives out there,
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