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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Though they have many competitors. A consultant who works on integrating SAP told me once that what gave them a competitive edge is that they let 3rd party consultants integrate SAP while others insist on in house consultants. That means that 3rd party consultant have a clear preference when it is time to advise the client on which system they should pick. That was 20y ago, not sure if it is still the case.

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Indeed, to SAP the "partner ecosystem" is a big thing. I think they realised early on that if they were to succeed, their success would be driven by consultants with "business expertise" who were recommending SAP as "best of breed".

Of course, the reality is that many of those consultants who are being charged to customers at eyewatering rates just finished the training course last week and are now "senior".

Don't know if it's still the same, but I suspect it will be - another insidious part of the 3rd party consultant relationship is (was) that customers would hire one of the big 5 to help them evaluate and select ERP systems. And that consultancy would also be in a consortium with one of the suppliers (usually SAP), to do the implementation. Isn't that a conflict of interest you would ask? Oh no, the two parts of the consultancy are behind strict Chinese walls, and the evaluation was strictly independent of the bid team. But surprisingly, the vendor they were in bed with always won the contract. As a sales rep with Oracle, I declined to bid on a project. I offered the CFO to write the name of the winning consortium in a sealed envelope, that he could open when the selection was announced.

still the case today with salesforce doing the same on the CRM side of things.

the few consultants that I know that work with these two seems to be paid more than generalist consultants.

When I worked with smaller ERPs then I've witnessed the same

3rd party were working closely with customers and helped them maintaining the stuff

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