What’s happening to the next generation of the SAP ecosystem?
techdisruptive.com
techdisruptive.com
I tend to think that the lack of openness is done on purpose - that is, SAP depends on its consulting partners to help sell its software, so they need an incentive to sell it (not to mention, SAP has a consultancy itself).
SAP has tried to evolve recently with new developments like HANA (mentioned in the article) and MII (tool used to connect manufacturing systems and provide real-time KPI dashboards), but without a more-open ecosystem that enables learning and innovation, it will continue to stagnate as modern technology overtakes it.
The biggest hindrance preventing companies from ditching SAP for a modern system is the fact that SAP is so complex and can handle so many business scenarios. Although it stands behind the curve in terms of technological innovation, it has decades of business specific functionality built into the system. That's the main reason, in my opinion, for why enterprises haven't jumped ship.
I doubt it. From my experience it's from outsourcing development to too many different groups with no coordination.
I worked on interfacing with a BigName's Hour Time Tracking module which takes hours to 8 decimal places. I submit the first payroll and hear it is imported with no errors.
Two days latter I get a frantic email asking me to resubmit because the Payroll module only takes 6 decimal places and was throwing out all the submitted hours. The systems are so large the consultants themselves cannot possibly understand it, let alone provide proper documentation.
However, I've noticed that even some of the core functionality is pretty light on documentation as well (and it is typically written in German-English).
Working with this stuff is so complex that in Germany, it's an often-told inside joke in the IT industry that some small and medium sized businesses actually became insolvent by moving to an SAP-based system.
The software is good in a sense that it gets it's job done. For example, should an application that completes financial transactions for one company be any different for another? This is why companies continue to buy SAP. Usability is a big issue from the client side.
From: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rig...
For instance, in your example you could use the CALL TRANSFORMATION statement to convert your table directly to XML.
The problem is that you can still write code as you would have done in the 1970's and SAP won't complain.
I've heard of this almost happening; a malfunctioning label printer can cause an entire plant to shut down for weeks while consultants work to find the problem.
For my purposes, SAP was a giant data entry system. And a crappy one, at that, as one of the most important fields for my work was not a field, but one of an arbitrary number of entries glommed together in a free text field where only the maintenance -- or not -- of data entry conventions by the many individuals creating records provided any degree of sanity.
Thank goodness for regular expressions!
Separately, it's not just the "sexiness" of the problem at hand. It's that in typical SAP environments, the level of bureaucracy to get anything done is overwhelming. Your technical problems are far and away secondary; for example, just getting what you need on a report, any report, in a format you can at least begin with, is a six month ordeal.
Having your hands on the pulse of billion dollar divisions is kind of cool. The six or eight layers of wankers you have to go through, to accomplish this -- not so much so.
This is really a pity, because large companies can gather lots of interesting data. For example, my wife works for a large (European) oil company, which has been in the process of installing SAP (it only took ~ 2 years, with lots of SAP consultants paid at 800-1000 euro per day </sarcasm>).
Anyway, being the big company that they are they have lots of gas stations spread all over the country, in the best locations possible. But nobody is doing anything with that sales data. They could write some heatmaps, make some sales predictions based on how close a gas station is to a major road, see when things change etc. There's no incentive for doing that, because it will either involve re-hiring those consultants at 800 Euro per day or trying to train the internal IT people to modify/extend the existing SAP installation (good-luck with that!)
On the flip side there
But if companies notice that their philoshopy is just take as much money of their current customers instead of getting new ones, they can get in trouble as soon as another brand its "sponsored" by big customers.