Like many people who read articles on internet, whether they are business, software, stock price movements, news, politics, or general social commentary, I have noticed a worrisome trend in the rise of “Click bait” headlines.
For whatever reason, negative news gets more clicks than positive news, so time and again we see headlines that highlight the negative news when the body of the article actually reveals positive news. Whatever your politics you have probably seen this. If you follow companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tesla, the number of negative headlines far outweighs the positive headlines, even on days where positive news should dominate.
As SAP emerges as a highly innovative company, launching HANA, Cloud, Analytics, Mobility and other high tech solutions, we too are subject to the “Click bait” phenomenon. Just recently a blog in the Wall Street Journal.com site http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/08/08/many-sap-customers-cant-make-a-business-case-for-hana/ ran with a headline, “Many SAP Customers cannot make a Business Case for HANA”
Certainly this is a provocative headline. Surprisingly however, upon reading the text, the author cites a survey of the American SAP User Group that reveals …”of 377 respondents asked whether they had purchased a HANA product, just 40% said they had, while 55% hadn’t and 5% didn’t know”. I don’t know about you, but where I come from a 40% purchase rate for a relatively new product the size and stature of HANA, seems like a stunning success and the headline could easily have read, “HANA gets a spectacular start with 40% adoption rate”.
What wasn’t mentioned in the WSJ blog was that HCL recently conducted a global survey of 100 executives from large enterprises which focused on their current and future plans to deploy SAP applications and infrastructure in the cloud. http://www.hcltech.com/press-releases/hcl-axon/hcl-research-reveals-39-billion-sap-landscape-could-m... HCL’s research revealed, “56% of organizations stated they expect to use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud in the future”
There are many excellent reasons why companies are moving to SAP HANA, and there are numerous HANA customer success stories, in companies of
all sizes and across all industries and geographies. There are also many compelling reasons for an organization to adopt HANA. A good example of this is an article that appeared this week about the State of Indiana’s reason for choosing HANA: State of Indiana Chooses SAP HANA Platform to Help Fight Infant
Mortality which shows the business case is not always a “dollars & cents” argument. Sometimes it’s good will and sometimes it’s politics.
