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Comment by ivalm | Hacker News Reader

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused

That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP.

Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

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-“ The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.”

I would fully agree with that, my generalization was kind of the opposite - if you work at a small company you are unlikely to use or work with SAP.

My other generalization was that HN was focused on startups, their technical culture, the cool and interesting, and almost by the definition not on boring bread and butter aspects. Does not mean that people/users themselves do not work there - I have spent twenty years on PeopleSoft/Oracle myself, but that is not why i come here and yes, the overall zeitgeist on HN toward e.g. Oracle is pretty consistent :->

FWIW, comment was not meant to be dismissive. I was genuinely fascinated, late at the night, at the notion that IT industry professionals might not be exposed to a behemoth such as SAP or even ERPs at large, and was pondering as to how that might come to be; there's absolutely personal bias & hubris in it, which is why I tried to understand where it came from and what's the diff between background of my friends and colleagues, vs perhaps some other IT professionals :)

> The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

The fact that you are arguing against this might be why you are getting downvoted. The original comment was saying “if you are in a small org you probably haven’t worked with SAP”, which is not the same thing.

Edit for further clarification: I can see how it might look like they were arguing what you stated, but it was more of a Bayesian inference. Many HN readers are at a small company, therefore a plausible reason that an arbitrary HN reader might not have heard of SAP would be that they are in the large pool of HN readers that are {in small companies and, therefore, do not work with SAP}

You know, I actually like your Bayesian interpretation. My main dislike was the dismissive tone in OPs phrasing, but I think his proposition might be OK.

There is nothing remotely dismissive in the (100% accurate) sentiment that small organizations have no need or desire to use large Enterprise-among-Enterprises applications such as SAP.

Your firm (KP) does use SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence software along with SAS analytics tools and to "support its data analysis activities against it's Oracle EHR system".

Since you are in the machine learning silo, your perspective may be a little skewed.

Sure, but lots of people don’t interact with it and would not know about it. The fact a company uses it doesn’t mean most engineers would know about it.

Companies that make things often have components managed by the ERP system. This flows down to the engineers. A software shop never deals with such things.

To be fair BusinessObjects is not SAP. It's just one of its acquisitions.

Well, if you look at it that way then Powerpoint is just one of microsoft’s acquisitions. After a certain period an acquisition becomes fully native to that business. In my view BusinessObjects passed that point with SAP a while ago.

Sorry, you are right, I should have been more specific. What I meant was BusinessObjects is only the reporting component they acquired to complement their product suite. It's not "the product" SAP sells (i.e. ERP).

"SAP" isn't a product either, it's a company name. When certain people talk about SAP they actually mean R3 or ECC. R3 is dead and the sun is setting on ECC which is being replaced by S4/HANA (which some people will still call SAP). SAP has a lot of products and it's main products have a lot of modules so two people using "SAP" may not even recognise each others versions.

It would not surprise me if KP were using ECC for their finances or some other area the parent comment is not familiar with.

There are also alternate vendors of ERP. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for example. At my current shop I manage INFOR VISUAL ERP.

...Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, all entirely different products for different sectors. Then there is Netsuite, Sage (lots of different products), SAP Business One (small SAP), Oracle ERP, JD Edwards...plus 1000 niche providers who are often migrating to NAV rather than their own product. It may be a shock to a FAANG, but the ethos is very much, 'move slow and don't break anything'. 10 year old versions still supported, that sort of thing. Another reason Windows is popular in enterprises is that ERP clients written in VB6 (or whatever) still run on Windows 10!

Windows is popular in enterprises for like, a million reasons. As a Windows Systems Administrator, The entire Windows ecosystem is built around business and business processes and management.

And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind

I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.

While Microsoft does sell their own SAP competitor they actually use SAP for their main accounting.

https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...

I'm pretty sure I've seen job adverts from Google for people with experience of Oracle Hyperion.

What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?

You'd think so... I thought so once... but again, perhaps not necessarily - ERP is NOT their core competency.

I.e. HR & Payroll legislative rules and best practices, business & organizational process transformation etc, are not what Google Engineers and IT necessarily have experience in, and if they allow hubris to override that fact, it might not go great.

Internets indicate that Google uses Oracle, Apple uses SAP.

This info may be outdated - for example, Facebook claims they built their own ERP just recently; I do wonder what that "backend database" part is though, or how much HR/Pay/Finance, as opposed to inventory/datacentre management, is custom: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/how-facebook-does-it/

How many more letters are we going to add to this acronym?

Do you fill in a timesheet using a computer ? If so, there will be SAP or another ERP system behind it.

SO what ERP system are you using? What do you sell? How do you manufacture? How do you handle inventory and finances?

You're either using SAP and you don't know it or you're using Oracle.

EDIT: just looked at your linkedin profile. I can see that your company literally has SAP consultants working for them full time. I don't know which SAP products you are using but you definitely are an SAP customer.

> You're either using SAP and you don't know it or you're using Oracle.

Or you're using NetSuite (which nowadays is Oracle, granted, but a rather different product from what most people think of when they talk about Oracle or SAP in an ERP context), or you're using Microsoft's ERP (Dynamics something or other? Never used it), or you're using something developed in-house (very likely running on an AS/400). Or hell, you might be running multiple ERPs in a weird limbo state mid-transition (e.g. Thermo Fisher, which was using AS/400 and SAP (or maybe it was Manhattan? Or both? My memory's fuzzy...) - the latter of which might very well have been partially implemented on AS/400 in order to integrate with the existing ERP - as of a couple years ago when I was working for them).

It's worth noting, too, that there are plenty of large and arguably-dysfunctional companies not using an ERP at all, or (like with my current employer) it's relegated to very specific uses because other functionality got offloaded to other systems (for example, it's relatively common to run a WMS separate from the ERP and integrate between the two, as it is with an eCommerce system; in my employer's case, all three are separate).

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