Posted here since it's pretty surprising how far commodity x86 servers have come.
For example, there are very few scenarios I can think of where even large startups would need more then 32TB of DDR5-4800 RAM or more then a few 400G Ethernet links on a single system.
But anyways, whomever buys them, it probably has a small overlap with the average HN reader. So it's meant as an illustrative example in a familiar context.
EDIT: Then again it's possible someone might buy it for personal use, e.g. if someone has multiple terabytes of spreadsheets that they need to work on simultaneously.
I can think of many ways, use it as a ramdisk NAS, minecraft game servers..
And yet, no one has produced something better. Everyone complains Concur is dogshit but no one has presented a worthy competitor. Where is the "SAP killer" startup? I'm sure someone will publish one to GitHub any day now.
Just like Threads, the "Twitter killer", dead on arrival.
I’m not trying to be dismissive. I absolutely try for the best internal user experience across the board, and it’s led me to try a lot of the shinier startup T&E systems. But Concur works well for finance and accounting, and frankly, it’s also cheap - something you also have to factor in G&A tooling. Those two factors together have overcome my desire to rip it out at a couple of different employers.
And given the price sensitivity for a tool that does not generate revenue for its customers, it remains a tough space for new entrants to disrupt. It’s not enough to make it good, you also gotta make it cheap. When I’m done with the startup carousel, I might try my hand at this - but you should bet against me!
Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier.
Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.
Notes was great for quick and dirty workflow applications. You could literally build and deploy some simple functionality in minutes. But it also made certain more advanced features effectively impossible to build at all; it just wasn't a general purpose platform. And the fact that source code was locked up inside binary files created huge obstacles to working in larger teams.
ERP is also something that should technically be achievable with a large industry-sponsored open source project but it never happens.
An open source version would be only step one, and not that useful by itself. You'd still need to create the entire consultant ecosystem SAP has on top.
I’d love to see the face of anyone operating under this belief when they get to the tax code of any country that is not the US.
A very good description of Microsoft or Google (and Apple getting there soon).
it says "and SAP HANA", there are lots of database cases for system like that.