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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).