Why TechCrunch is boring, SAP is not, and the world has gone mad
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peopleprocesstech.com
Anyway, I have to repeat my favourite quote about SAP from a Slashdot discussion:
"SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rig...
Which I think sums it up nicely.
Maybe there should be another version of that silly Gartner diagram where the axes are "importance" and "interestingness" - SAP would be high importance and low interestingness .
Which SAP instance are you suggesting to connect to, would I be so inclined? How would you start creating things for SAP vs. for example Facebook (or G+ now, or the Mac Store)?
There's a set of companies on the one side with broad public appeal and lots of ways to hack and tinker. On the other side you have a behemoth with an army of suits, costing you a couple of limbs for every move - and it's completely useless for the layman.
Note the last statement. If you don't run a business and are in a couple of related positions you just don't care about that stuff. If you are you're probably using and either loathing or loving it. But even if they had SAP in 99% of all companies, they'd still only reach a limited subset of people.
That said, I completely agree that there are (apparently) higher barriers to entry to SAP and it mystifies me why this would be in their best interests -- I assume in some sense it is the security of the "gated community," where one knows that if one engages a SAP consultant he/she has already been vetted in some fashion.
This sort of approach (which I find typical of Germany) leads to a high average but a real handicap when it comes to innovation. But then again if you are doing something very well it is easy to make money hand over fist and then use that money to buy the latest greatest new sauce once it is ready (which is what SAP has done here with this acquisition).
But the problem is that its not meant to be run at home. I'm guessing most contracts for SAP run into the 10s of millions and I don't think they intend to give that up quite easily. Though there are a few companies (for example: Secude) that pretty much sit around and build hacks on SAP applications, but that too involves a lot of paperwork with SAP and almost always ends up with SAP buying out those companies.
And what does this has to do with anything? Do you have a copy of the Google search engine to run at home? (the real one, not a plain text indexer like Google desktop).
Neither Facebook nor SAP are solving particularly interesting problems. Is it useful to facilitate meaningful human interactions? Yes. Is it valuable to glean insights about the operational structure of a business? Certainly.
Both of these companies do something like this, but emphasizing the wrong aspects of scalability. TechCrunch is still boring, but SAP isn't interesting.
Then you have no perspective of the problems SAP is solving.
SAP is solving tons of big data problems with a variety of interesting data modeling and analysis.
These are wildly interesting problems. They are as interesting in a small startup environment as they are in a large company.
There seems to be this real us versus them attitude with people who identify with startups.
People that work in SAP are no different than startups. Many people that work at SAP come from startups.
It's not a startup versus enterprise thing. It's (partially) a question of whether the interesting propellerhead problems are in aid of an interesting larger goal.
1) Yes, you can download a trial version as Zalthor points out. I'm trying to work with SAP to make this more open and easy to do. It's important.
2) SAP customers vary from 1 employee (SAP BusinessOne) to 250,000+ employees (SAP ERP). But from a download perspective the interesting stuff is coming with Gateway and the Unwired Platform. With those tools - the server components of which will be available in the cloud - you can build Edge/Web Apps and Mobile apps using whatever tech you want. Ruby on Rails, iPhone, whatever. That's the sort of open integration which I hope will interest this audience, not downloading copies of SAP ERP for home.
3) Couldn't agree more, don't block social media at work. I wouldn't work for a company that did. By the way, SAP encourage social media and have 50k+ employees. But some organizations are stuck in the dark ages.
4) Streamworks integration is coming for the mainstream soon. It will be PaaS, integrated with the new Java environment and developer toolkit and supports open integration. It's had a bad press so far. Hopefully this will help.
Hope this helps.
For example, here's the one-liner about BusinessOne that you pointed out:
A SINGLE INTEGRATED BUSINESS MANAGEMENT APPLICATION FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
^^ I get nothing from that. The details section on their website don't do much better. I fear this is not accidental; the pitch is just enough to get you on the phone with one of their sales people.
SAP has a new CMO, Jonathan Becher, who I hope will bring some improvements to this stuff. Marketing is supposed to be about making stuff easier to buy - and as you rightly point out, SAP aren't always that good at that, especially to a casual observer.
For example. I read the article and think ok, this SAP HANA in-memory technology sounds interesting. I google it, go to their website and see a two minute video that supposedly explains it.
I think cool I'll watch that to get an overview of what it's all about. I watch the first twenty seconds after which I'm still actually eager to learn more. But then the video stops and they put an overlay telling me I need to register to continue watching the video. WTF!
So I still have not much idea of what it is and frankly no further inclination to find out.
For ERP applications (which SAP is arguably most famous for) you are basically getting all of the "standard" features that you require to run a business in one highly integrated (and usually highly modular) package. This will include, at a very basic level:
- Accounting (general ledger, fixed assets, accounts receivable, accounts payable, budgeting, consolidation, maybe treasury)
- HR
- Payroll
- Supply chain/warehouse
- Manufacturing (processes, bill of materials etc.)
- CRM
- Interfaces (including web portals, EDI, perhaps direct links to manufacturing systems)
- Many many others...
What arguably makes this all rather complex is providing all of this functionality in a way that can work across a large multi-national organisation - for example, the accounting and tax rules in different countries can be very different. Even the basic technical challenges of getting a Tier-1 ERP working in a global company are non-trivial.
Factor that these things are highly customisable and you can perhaps see why they have to be so complex.
In my decade-long career as a lawyer for customers who buy enterprise IT, the only company that I consider more obnoxious across the table than SAP is Oracle. If you are doing business with these companies, you pretty much deserve what you get. I've seen a few CIOs lose their jobs when ERP falls apart (it almost always does, for a variety of reasons).
I'm not saying there isn't a bunch of useful technology, but these aren't technology companies – they're sales organizations, and that side of the business is not pretty. I can't understand why anyone does business with obnoxious sales organizations like these in 2011.
Part of the problem is monolithic, kitchen-sink software. Most people are basically using SAP/Peoplesoft as a development framework anyway – playing into more vendor lock-in. It's like the Lotus Notes of the aughts.
There are tons of targeted solutions that can play nice with intelligent use of modern, open data interchange protocols.
There are a couple open source ERP products, Compiere which is technically open source but uses a service model. However, the most interesting open source ERP is by far Openbravo. If you're question about other options was serious, you should look into using Openbravo: http://www.openbravo.com/about-us/
When I open a software demo video, I want over-the-shoulder or screencast-style video of the software in action. I do not want the Comic Book Guy narrating Wikipedia's definition of 'agility'.
To say that SAP ERP doesn't scale on the other hand is a bit nuts. It scales easily to the biggest companies in the world. Apple iTunes Store sales billing runs on SAP.
I've not spent a lot of time looking at open source ERP in the context of large enterprise. I'd be interested in a serious comparison of the contenders and their UX, ability to scale to many countries/currencies/languages and their ROI and supportability and extensibility.
No, it doesn't. I understand that's a meme because it does happen, but "almost always" isn't just something you add to the conversation to try to make your point stronger.
SAP ERP systems fill a purpose, and they do so quite well.
There are definitely instances where a change to your ERP system is so large that it's under budgeted, or the consultants hired aren't any good, but ERP is a value proposition provided you don't f it up.
But almost all ERP systems fail? I still cannot get behind this. You're saying in 10 years the vast majority of deals you've done with ERP have failed?
If that's really true, perhaps you should do something differently. I work with many successful ERP systems. I actually haven't worked with any failures, although of course I'm aware of them because of people like you who tell me.
I trust your experience, but at the same time, it's very different than my own.
There's very little I can do to help, since ERP vendors are very risk averse. I can assure you that by the time you own a license, they've booked the revenue and moved on to the next sale. If anyone gets stuck holding the bag other than the customer, it's the consultant doing the implementation. I usually advise clients not to buy from these (and other) vendors, unless they accept the risks. They're free to self-insure against it.
As a matter of course, the CIO gets someone's foot up his ass for a year or two and is lucky to keep his/her job. Budgets are blown. Change orders flood in. Unforeseen costs. Missed deadlines. Contract remedies are weak because no one had the stomach to fight for them when they were on the table. Finger pointing everywhere. And so the world turns...
What you describe is a classic large Systems Implementor problem, and that can be very true. The A-team sold the project and the B-team deliver it. They screw up the requirements gathering and the implementation. I've seen it happen many times.
Sometimes the product is to blame because it doesn't work as promised. Most of the time the consulting organisation didn't know the product well enough and made a mess of it. Totally agree on your contract point. Agree contracts, terms and conditions up front. Pay attention and take time.
The problem with ERP is institutionalized – the licensors have set themselves up to absorb almost no risk of project failure. The big consultants are also masters of shifting risk back to the client. That leaves the client to deal with a middle tier of consultants that is a mixed bag of capabilities, capitalization, etc.
There are many, probably thousands, of companies out there who are using large ERP systems pretty effectively - of course, you generally don't hear much about those.
You don't hear anything about them (except maybe a press release that no one reads) because they're always highly confidential. If my client has a claim, they use Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.
The sad thing is that SAP started with all the right intentions, one model fits all - but they messed up when they bowed to the demands of ignorant IT managers and opened the pandoras box of custom built software.
The real irony is that SAP started because custom built software was the problem, and SAP's founders knew - like anyone with a bit of intelligence - that almost all companies run the same business processes.
Oracle is much worse from a sales/license perspective and a lot of my SAP customers are frustrated with them. Most of my customers have excellent relationships with their SAP account team.
On the ERP falling apart point - sorry but that's just not born out by fact. Project failures and system failures happen and most of the time that's caused by either using the wrong product, or by bad consulting - or poor support. I've never encountered a SAP ERP that has fallen apart.
SAP is a company with two CEOs - one sales and one technical, and they are definitely half a technology company. I really recommend you take a look at the tech they are producing. Of course they have to sell and market it - they have to turn a profit from all the R&D. Shame you have had a bad experience with the sales community.
Me: If the system fails to perform to spec within the anticipated implementation timeframe, we get our money back, or at least get to hold back part of the fee until you get it right.
ERP Licensor Finance Guy: We can't do that, for revenue recognition reasons.
Me: Why should my client care about your accounting? My client has a business to run. What happens when you're paid, and we have a box of nuts and bolts to show for millions of sunk dollars?
ERP Implementor Operations Guy: We've never had a problem in the entire history of our company. We're good guys. Trust us.
ERP Licensor Finance Guy: If you don't sign within a week, our discount comes off the table.
Me: Here we go again.
So, SAP is certainly not sexy, but if you can take the pain and get good at it, you'll make big bucks.
What's changing is that open standards mean that the wider tech community can integrate into SAP. This both commoditises the business, drives rates down and makes it more accessible. I suspect that in 10 years time we will see a very different Enterprise IT market.
This is a good example of one thing SAP are doing poorly.
An equivalent of this is "A copy of Microsoft at home". I hear even SAP consultants speaking like this, which shows their communication is not getting across properly.
SAP is the company. They have many products. Each one can be installed separately. Some are available as demos or learning products.
TechCrunch people know this, I'm sure there are plenty of ex-SAP consultants who got pretty tired of badly run projects by badly educated middle managers who have no business being put in charge of enormous and complex SAP implementations.
I have worked for some of the biggest companies in the world fixing some of the rubbish out there, and you know why SAP has so much money? Because the business just order another instance to migrate to each time they mess it up.
And so it goes on...
SAP seems to run a powerful Reality Distortion Field. I live in a municipality (Johannesburg) that is experiencing a huge multi-year billing crisis, following a flawed SAP implementation. Despite being a disaster, SAP gave it an award: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view...
After being awarded "CTO of the year", the incompetent one will probably move on, away from the problem he/she created, and will possibly inflict the same damage to the next company that hires him/her, generating even more profit.
The Internet was built in the seventies on seventies tech, which it still uses today (IPv4).
I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but this is a dumb yardstick to use.
The internet is a perfect example of technology that is constantly evolving inspite of it's roots.
Every patch they release is not more unstable! They have so many software products, you can't say "Every" about any of their software.
Money and size is irrelevant. Concrete supports all of our homes, but calling is cool compared to e.g. "ultralight metallic microlattice" [1] is ridiculous by most people's definition of cool.
[1]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-...
Actually, no. Reality is what counts. I don't bet my money based on perception, and neither I trade with perception in mind. Except if I'm looking to take advantage of some bubble.
Then I'd be surprised if you do well in trading. For monetary value; perceived value is value. We have no other means of valuing things monetarily.
To some extent entrepreneurship found in technology has been the counter-culture to the con game that the financial markets have become accustomed to.
The cost of making something is only used to determine price floor (i.e. if perceived value is lower than the price floor it makes no sense to create this product).
What your model of perceived value isn't accounting for are speculators who are in a market with no real vested interest in the product. The correct amount of speculation within a market can round out extremes but there is a balance. Free markets generally find the best prices for most things and works well in the majority of situations.
Then I'd be surprised if you do well in long term trading / investing.
Perceived value can change from one day to the next. You don't want to get caught in a bubble.
You better sharpen the "perceived value" everybody, er, perceives, with your OWN value judgement that takes facts, numbers, long term factors etc into account. Else, you're trading blindly based on what everybody else perceives, which is really fickle.
"perceived value is value" but you don't want to invest based on perceived value.
You want to invest based on (your understanding of) the factors that SHAPE the perceived value.
Else, you're behind the curve.
Of course you do. Reality is unattainable, perception is all we have. What you're saying is that your perception is different from the average, and that's fine, but it doesn't change my point.
Besides, do you really perceive SAP as a cool company? I certainly don't. Whether it's a good investment or not is a different issue.
While I understand the pedantic argument, (hey, I've read my Hume), I mean that I don't rely on my "perception" as is, but try to form it based on evidence, facts, numbers and other stuff from the "unattainable reality".
Reality might be ultimately unattainable, but a, say, DNA test for example can show with 100% certainty who the raper is or isn't. And a educated rundown on the numbers, performances, etc, beats perception, especially such as cultivated by PR and the media, anytime.
"""Besides, do you really perceive SAP as a cool company? """
No, but I also don't like "cool" companies. I could care less about the flavor du jour and "ramen to riches" stories. SAP is interesting in it's own way, and invaluable for tons of businesses using their system.
But that's the whole point. SAP is boring, and although that's actually good for them - it means they're reliable and dependable -, the TC guy is also right.
Whose perception? That's not my perception. SAP has innovation in a number of areas, including in memory databases.
It came out of the TREX project, that is an SAP project.
Hana came from a company founded in 2000 by Sang Cha, a Stanford University professor, that spent 5 years developing this and was acquired by SAP in November 2005. This acquisition then formed the basis of SAP R&D Korea.
For all of you SAP naysayers (I oftentimes find myself among you) the best explanation I've ever heard for why to work in the SAP ecosystem is "If you want to change the world, you should work with the biggest lever you can find".
Feel free to ask questions.
I built a framework for integrating data between SAP's cloud offering and their on premise solutions but after unsuccessfully trying to opensource it in collaboration with SAP (a frustrating experience) I pretty much stopped my community activities. That experience sucked a lot of the SAP enthusiasm out of me but I have watched the company get much better over the last 2 years and I am in talks about getting involved in an another open source project sometime in the next few months.
I have done plenty of integration with SAP in terms of processing IDOCs and I understand some of the business processes in SAP on the manufacturing side - but how can I go beyond that and understand SAP even more.
http://www.sapremotelyaccess.com/ - this site provides SAP on a hard drive, do you think it's legal? I'm guessing not!
As far as integration goes, IDOCs are definitely a good start. You can also look into exposing things from Netweaver by creating web services using the ICF node http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70ehp1/Helpdata/EN/55/33a83e37... Theres also gateway and PI for integrating into SAP.
SAP ERP? CRM? NetWeaver?
Things have shuffled around so much I couldn't even tell you exactly where to look anymore if you wanted to get more into the 3rd party partnership area. I'd say start with the SAP EcoHub since that is what all the "app store" type SAP stuff is falling under now (or last I checked). There is a lot of traction here as SAP continues to try to ramp up cloud based offering and it could turn out to be a really interesting space if you can find a way to get into it.
Theres also the whole data analytics area which involves Business Objects.
And for those familiar with Java and not really interested in picking up ABAP, there is the composite environment which is supported by a variety of tools integrated into eclipse.
As far as tutorials go, I'm not entirely sure whats out there now but SCN/SDN (the SAP community) has a lot of content in it. If you're looking to learn ABAP you can also check out the tutorials from Thomas Jung: http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/2010/07/30/abap-freak-show-a...
How about best practices and agility? Testing, automation, build/deploy strategy, etc...
Btw, thank you for the explanation. Greatly appreciated.
Even if I agree with the author's sentiment, that last line made me laugh.
Also: Apple, with their over inflated IPO? (their IPO having been long ago) destroys SAP's revenue and profit.
Edit: The world was built on hard work, but I'm not sure how SAP is necessarily the embodiment of that.
I don't think the world has gone mad, I just think it's how the world is perceived from by different age groups. When you are a teenager you think you'll never stop listening to the cool new music when you are older, but when you are older you realise the latest craze is cute but not that relevant.
On a different tangent, every year or two I have a look at what is happening in the open source world in the space that SAP operates in. A few promising things pop up from time to time but never gets much traction, but it does seem to progress a bit over time, slowly. I think the only thing that will move it forward is if universities put some projects behind it in their business and technology courses.
However you slice it, both SAP and Facebook have major share of their respective markets. Facebook seems to monetize the market better. Next story please.
On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
I also like that by his own metrics Facebook has ~800m users, SAP has ~500m users, therefore Facebook is insignificant?
But of course, TFA is (apparently) a SAP consultant and his tagline is "Tangential Musings about Enterprise IT". It's not like he's going to say otherwise.
And in the meantime, the global economy is going down the drain and Bubble 2.0 means that investors are throwing more of our savings down the drain. Some of the latest startup IPO valuations have been ridiculous.
Yes, my primary income is SAP consulting, but that doesn't mean I am not interested in wider IT issues. Facebook is a very relevant trend, but social media is a fickle partner, and the crown has changed hands several times already. Valuing it at 19x earnings is nuts.
Please do take a look at the innovations that SAP are doing. I look at wider market trends and I think what SAP is achieving in innovation is well beyond what Oracle/IBM/Microsoft/Google are doing right now. You may be surprised.
"Well for my money SAP is possibly the most interesting technology firm in the world right now."
To be sure, what trips one's trigger may not do so for another, so to each his own. That said, this is just a synopsis of one guy's very tiny view on the world.
To the original author: the value of an acquisition doesn't set the pace for what's interesting. If that were the case, Exxon would be the single most interesting thing on the planet.
Rather than bitching about someone else not writing about something that interests you, why not start the Enterprise IT version of TechCrunch?
I think there are probably many of us that are interested in this side of the "enterprise" but SAP is sort of its own universe and difficult to understand/penetrate from the outside.
Most of their detailed documentation is only available for people who take up their courses (yes, they are that evil) and certification exams.
I do remember quite a bit of it was available on rapidshare though unless you were already working on something specific you wouldn't know what exactly to search for.
To start with, I would suggesting getting a book on SAP R/3. More specifically the SAP R/3 handbook by Jose Antonio Hernandez. I don't know of any thing available for free (legally) that is as good a place to start.
As for the product offerings from SAP, they more or less seem to be components that sit on the same application stack. So getting into one of these applications could provide insight into what everything else does.
Disclaimer: I work as an SAP Basis consultant (that's sort of an application admin + OS admin + DBA)
You won't get a SAP job that way, but it might give you enough of an edge to take on SAP-related projects (think "sure, I've done webservice calls into Salesforce and I know how that works with SAP XI, happy to work on your integration project").
Or take a really expensive class from SAP (usually paid for by your employer).
The truth is that (it seems as though) SAP doesn't want people to be familiar with the system. Their distribution channel is consultants, and consultants make more money if the system is opaque and hard to get up to speed on.
This will be the downfall of SAP as we know it IMO (and Oracle, and every other enterprise application that relies on a technical consultant's input), the deliberate opacity of the system for the sake of the distribution channel.
Proprietary lock-in (or dial up the "exclusivity" meter on knowledge and any budding subject matter experts). Enroll some of the customer personnel in expensive training only available from SAP (or SAP "approved" vendors).
Contrast to open source models where anybody can become fluent with the code or platform and can be hired or contracted to work at a fraction of the rate a SAP (or to be fair, any proprietary, lock-in "turnkey" "solution").
While I departed the corporate IT world a few years, I have seen the same shenanigans with the likes of Oracle, SAP and others too remote to be recognized by many here. In fact, I owned a company that profited as a "service partner" for a data communications legacy "commerce" software suite maker.
SAP's technology must be interesting for develpers because it costs exorbitant amount of money to hire anybody to work on it. SAP is interesting for investors because it pulls in massive 10% profit margin. SAP's services are interesting for customers because it has high barriers to deploy, maintain and replace. SAP is interesting
By comparison, Facebook-like projects must be boring for developers because they flock to work on them, even if for free or `ramen-profitable' for year or two. Facebook is boring for investors because it manages mere 25% profit margin. Facebook is boring for users because barriers to entry and exit are essentially non-existent.
What kind of metrics is that?
The entire thing is one big fat straw-man argument. The author (the bored one) didn't even mention FB in the article in question. The author (the attacking one) pulled that out of thin air based on little more than:
>From what I get of her article, if it’s not Apple or a startup, she’s not interested
Then he proceeds to refute the argument that he just set up by enlisting stats...not even convincing ones at that.
And finally whether something is boring or not is entirely subjective. This angle is as pointless as proving to stamp collectors that collecting stamps is boring.
I agree with his point in that the glamorous companies get attention at the cost of others & that this is a problem. The manner in which it was done however is a fine example of:
>a crap piece of journalism
I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. HN readers perhaps might get some benefit from understanding SAP technologies and how they integrate into the stuff they want to hack with. I've employed some real hackers into the SAP market and it is a deeply interesting and open technology stack.
That it is. Clearly SAP is doing something right.
Somewhat off topic, I'm surprised you say "open technology stack". I'm not particularly familiar with SAP tech, but I always thought they were as closed as it gets (& successfully so). Have I missed something?
This is somewhat OT, but can we stop with this? Quoting the immature salvos fired between random people on Twitter doesn't give your blog post any more credibility, and probably less. It's like news networks nowadays - they're more interested in what people on Twitter and YouTube think of some topic rather than seasoned analysts and correspondents.
The whole blog post would've been just as informative and way less irritating if I didn't have to wade through all the Twitspeak.
Having success and market penetration doesn't make things cool. It's great for the company, great for the ecosystem (and - that's a topic for another time in this particular case..) built around it. But not cool. Not sexy.
It could be. Success, piles of money and 'cool' aren't incompatible per se. They are just unrelated in my book.He has to accept that for a large audience out there, _in the real world_, there's nothing more boring than looking at SAP (and - wait. and wait. and wait).
"My advice: stop being bored by the stuff which makes the world turn."
My advice: Don't blow this out of proportion. If SAP dies tomorrow, the world is not going to end.
To explain: I meant if they go out of business (and I didn't imply that this was even remotely likely). If the software had a kind of stroke and wouldn't work anymore, starting tomorrow, I'd agree with you.
I just hate the metrics used and the 'makes the world go 'round' tone in that article. What percentage of shirts, shoes and gadgets are produced in China? Would it be 'cool' (nothing against China..) to be live there, based on the 'We provide x% of the world's shoes' metric?
Well that's interesting, because if the SuccessFactors acquisition is indicative of SAP's intent to become more "cloud based", and those critical infrastructure systems which run on SAP move to the cloud, then if the company went out of business their software would just 'have a stroke'...
'Boring' is a subjective term. Hell, I don't read TC unless it is linked here and couldn't care less about them, but I assume that 'boring' is what came to their mind and (talking out of line here maybe?) connects with the majority of the readers. It sure as hell connects with me. SAP is boring. For me anyway.
Do people in the SAP eco-system think that their work is boring? I sure hope not.
Thing is: If someone says 'This is boring' then he's correct. That's an opinion, a feeling towards a subject. No need to argue about it. You can discuss _why_ that comes up or if TC should be opinionated like that in the first place, but the blog post fails to address that in any meaningful way.
That post seems to be a rant about 'Why aren't we considered interesting and "cool" although our software runs in a majority of the world's breweries' and the whole argumentation is flawed. As I wrote elsewhere: Market penetration doesn't make you interesting to people per se. Being the leader in 'world's transactions' (?) doesn't by default make you a sexy subject for the technology folks.
On a less serious side note:
I found it hilarious that someone defending SAP as being cool resorted to a comparison table. With bullet points, outlining the market size and comparing company values. It's like being the nerd in high school and sending a letter to your beloved which rationalizes your desirability by comparing your grades with ~that dude's~.
I read somewhere that a large part of Apple's supply chain management is built on SAP, as well as being the system of record for iTunes/App Store transactions.
I can't find a reliable citation, since this will probably not be something they broadcast, due to their secrecy.
But then, they have the capital to massively spend on heavyweight internal systems.
As I understand it, this is the reason why you get a weekly bill from Apple: the iTunes ABAP system makes financial postings to ERP, to reduce the overall number of transactions - and presumably also their credit card overhead.
To me: -
* Java EE == my day job == Work
* SAP == Work
* Working on own app at home written in Haskell == Fun hobby project that I do outside of work hours and doesn't feel like work
Is it dull? It depends. For the TC crowd, yes, but that's because they're consumer oriented and not very technical.
It should be interesting to the HN crowd because it's a huge opportunity for disruptive innovation.
I would like to say a few things though, especially to those people who think that it's an us and them scenario.
First, I have personally spent a lot of time on open source software, and you will for example find some of my code in the Linux Kernel, if someone hasn't removed it by now.
Second, I think that closed communities are a bad thing, and it's something I strongly believe that SAP needs to get better at. Yes, SAP has the largest community network in the world with 3 million members. But it's not good enough at opening that up to the wider tech community, which is a loss.
Third, I think that integration to the wider tech community like HN, would be a huge benefit to Enterprise IT. We can be silo'd and the expertise of this group in writing nice-to-use apps is something we really need.
According to Wikipedia, Facebook has 3000+ employees, and SAP AG has 53513. So, profit per employee is ~300k for FB and 22k for SAP.
Main point is FB's financial model isn't proven medium-term. Also SAP have a lot of low-cost employees in India/China. Hard to compare with FB really.
If I have a 1,000,000 person company that has 1 bln in profits, and you have a 100 person company that makes 10 million in profits, you make 100 mores per employee.
But I get to bank a cool billion...
To be honest I have no idea what SAP does nor do I really care, we just push a load of data over a network on a regular basis and the team who deal with SAP probably do something.
They all have to wear suits though while us Java programmers get to kick back in normal, comfortable clothing.
Techcruch think Facebook making an acquisition hire for a couple of guys is more interesting that a founder selling out a company for $3 and a bit billion.
You would weep with laughter if it wasn't so tragic.
That said, welcome to my world. It's been an interesting experience working in an industry (ecommerce) that is regarded as a huge yawnfest by most of the startup community. The reality is that there really are very interesting problems to solve. Algorithms to predict demand curves, optimize warehouse pullbox location, and identify product flow constraints are all arguably more interesting problems to solve than sharing photos.
Nonetheless, nobody cares. And that's fine, mostly.
What does that even mean?
I suppose it was an exaggerated choice of term, but I was trying to set aside the specific issue of SAP to talk about the somewhat broader issue of how the tech community often finds technology boring if it doesn't appear in the form of a consumer app.
Seriously, once your company is using SAP, it's rarely going to be worth rejecting them. It will be more cost effective to just pull SAP data out of SAP and use it in whatever way you need to than it is to try to customize SAP or get a new system that better fits your needs.
A big reason they stick around is because decision-makers are so fearful of changing very basic systems (i.e. payroll, accounting, etc).
Totally agree with you on the UX nightmares, and this needs to be fixed. But if you look at SAP's new products, they are pretty interesting from a UX perspective. Design thinking is at the core of it. I really encourage you to take a look at for example http://www.experiencesaphana.com
SAP legal (like most large IT companies) has work to be done, and they know that. I hope they do something.
On the sales side your comments surprise me. I work with those guys on a regular basis and the vast majority are customer focussed: they have to be, or customers won't continue to buy. But this has changed a lot in the last 10 years.
SAP is rarely ripped out because it's rarely worth replacing systems of record. They are a long term investment, and most financial people are fine with SAP: it affords them control.
That said, the author of this post has an opinion. Cool. We all have opinions. But he was off the mark in implying that there's something wrong with techcrunch. There isn't. They're all about the cool factor and dare I say shallow startup porn.
The post was almost a great point but the implication that something is wrong with TechCrunch killed it. I'm not a fan of techcrunch. I think it's shallow garbage and reads like a thinly veiled commercial a lot of times. But I won't be writing any blog posts complaining about that any time soon. That's what we've come to expect from them and their audience loves it.
on any large german airport you currently get met with large billboards by IBM, advertising their urgent need for SAP consultants.
SAP is the backbone of the large tech consulting industry.
and no, you cannot compare it to facebook. like comparing a tv station to a manufacturing company.