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Comment by dvdhsu | Hacker News Reader

Hi! (I'm one of the editors of this post.) When I was researching SAP, I found a fact sheet: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010..., that has quite a few interesting facts:

* "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices"

* "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands"

* "77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system"

Wow!

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TBH SAP is almost required for big corporations as they usually are publicly traded companies, require external audits from BIG4(and these guys know how to get data from standard SAP models, not so much from you self-developed system) and have to report their financials in consistent way.

For example Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all can use SAP internally. But it would be false to state that all their businesses are run on SAP...

Every respectable ERP provides ways to export/access the data in a way that covers all national/international requirements for audits and reporting. This is not SAP-specific.

I didn't say that there are no other factors (like for example that CTO won't be fired when SAP/Oracle implementation fails, but will be 100% fired when ERP_X implementation fails)

I only pointed out that the statistics in parent post can be skewed due to the sample of top 500 corporations which can implement SAP for reasons different to running the business.

I would be interested to know if they are actually using SAP. These companies are so much better at software development and they are swimming in so much money that they could even implement something by themselves.

Why would they? It's none of their core business and SAP already has everything covered. Think of all the legal/financial stuff. The UI is not that important in that field, your domain expert in that area knows how to navigate stuff.

I won't wave that question off completely.

It wasn't Amazon's core competency to offer IaaS/PaaS, before they did. GCP and AWS are closely playing in SAP's enterprise customer base. There is huge addressable market there. They've innovated better than SAP in technology space, on parts other than business software.

If they can succeed developing their own ERP, better than SAP, they could even redeploy the development teams from being cost center to profit center.

If I am SAP, I see them as strategic long term risk.

Event Microsoft does it (https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...), despite the fact that they have their own ERP product (Dynamics).

Established ERP systems take so long to configure that sometimes, it makes more sense to write your own in-house. Tesla did just that. And in only 4 months.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft do, Amazon does not, based on some moderate Googling for job postings, staff on LinkedIn, and conference attendees.

That's impressive. Of course Apple distributes hardware, so it makes the most sense to me. Microsoft, I suppose, had to distribute Windows boxes at some point, so it makes some sense to me. But I definitely wonder at which point Google started seeing a need for SAP. As soon as they started selling gadgets? Before then, to generally manage finances?

Finance, HR, Office Equipment, Travel Expenses etc...

> These companies are so much better at software development

That's like saying "why doesn't Tiger Woods win Wimbledon? He's so much better at sport than anyone else". There are lots of different types of software development, and lots of different types of software engineers. Corporate IT projects don't succeed or fail on algorithmics - it's a completely different job, where 90% of the difficulty is managing people and politics

I always wonder about the reality of these kinds of statements. The truth ranges from the optimistic version "we're heavily making use of this software" through "we made use of it a few years back, and are now phasing it out" and "we use it for one or two core services, but everything else is run on Y" all the way to "we have a single instance somewhere we forgot to switch off and we still pay for", etc. This is a bit of a special case, but still, the reality is probably somewhat different than the face value.

Also lidl sunk 500 mil € in SAP and cancelled the gig after that.

SAP has a reputation to take down businesses

*edit: mistook aldi and lidl

I think you are referring to "Lidl"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lidl-cancels-sap-introduction...

> * "[SAP] customers include 98% of the 100 most valued brands"

That, er, ought to be exactly 98 of the 100 of them, shouldn't it??

That sort of report customisation will cost you about £500 /s

For a moment I misread that as pricing by the second...

> "[SAP] customers distribute 78% of the world’s food and 82% of the world’s medical devices"

That sounds wrong, as I am pretty sure the majority of the worlds food is distributed in places that can't afford or need SAP (and is essentially sold black market). I doubt that street markets in India use it for example.

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