One-third of Europe's software industry is SAP
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Ah the typical European startup dilemma. The governments recognize that in an age of difficult unemployment and stagnating growth, new avenues of entrepreneurship need to be embraced, and so they set up all sorts of programs to encourage new startups. But then these startups get beyond the very early stage, and need to raise capital to continue their growth. And the look to institutional money in Europe. And no one will give them any. Because the European investor mindset is so risk averse, that only those who already have money are considered safe enough to start real businesses (continuing the old guard).
Personally, I think that's great. You folks in Europe are just reasserting that we in the US have the more opportune climate for startups. And so we'll continue to steal all your good ones ;)
Europe is a big place, with lots of different countries, and much like states in the US, they work differently. True, the investment climate makes raising money much harder than for companies in the US, but on the other hand, there are sometimes fewer regulatory hurdles for companies looking into exploring new business concepts.
Take FundedByMe. They're fulfilling the promise of equity-based crowdfunding in Sweeden, and because they're not a US-based company, don't need to deal with the SEC and FINRA. The US has tried to set up something comparable via the Jobs act, but major players have kept all the regulatory hurdles in effect, and so for-profit crowdfunding is still a few years off, if it ever really happens at all.
Don't get me wrong -- we still have a big lead in the US, especially in the Valley, but don't get complacent about how quickly that lead can evaporate through the missteps of well-meaning regulators and politicians, or through the negative effects of software patent law.
Laws and regulations are often simpler to change (although still difficult) than the mindset of a bunch of old men sitting on the majority of investment capital.
If you want to bootstrap decent tech and not get sued by someone who patented the double click, maybe Europe's not such a bad market to start in.
Also happens to be true of the US as well.
VC funds only fund a minority of tech businesses, and for a good reason too, many tech businesses are simply unsuitable for that type of investment. VCs typically need to seek a 10x return over 3-5 years for the maths to work, and most tech companies aren't going to grow that fast.
that's missing from the title.
Growing up I found that a tremendous amount of software I used was European, and most of it was free (as in beer). Not to disparage German software developers, but almost none of this software was German.
There's absolutely fantastic software from all over the continent, but due to various economic/cultural aspects doesn't revenue in quite the numbers boring SAP does.
edit upon further review I've found a bit more German influence in my software than I remembered, sorry Germans!
I have no idea how tail-heavy the landscape of European software companies is.
BTW, could you supply some examples of the "fantastic software" from Europe you grew up using? Just curious.
An awful lot of stuff written for the C64 and Amiga. And then when the same dev traditions moved onto the PC, that stuff. The demoscene and peripheral software movements figured pretty heavily into it.
For example, I spent thousands of hours in Protracker (Finland I believe), Scream Tacker III (Finland), Fast Tracker 2 (Sweden I think)...there was also a few graphic programs I mucked around with Sculpt 3d (England I believe)..a few toy fractal programs, there was a great piece of music software I used for a spell from Spain that I can't for the life of me remember, some ANSI graphics editors. I'm currently keeping a copy of the pro-audio level Renoise installed (a pile of Euro-authors if I've ever seen one) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise
but I also spent thousands of hours watching the latest scene productions coming out of Europe at the time. Growing up on the East Coast, we ended up with a small, but relatively healthy demoscene in the early and mid 90s and productions routinely (and quickly) found their way onto local BBSs.
But don't forget that Linux is originally a piece of European software (Finland), UAE (which let's me relive some of my youth) was started in Germany, theproduckkt (Germany), and on and on and on...
and then there's other stuff I'm keeping tucked away for when I get some time to start playing around with micro-controllers http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/ (Sweden)
most of this is just stuff I was interested in at the time, there's tons I never even touched
basically a tradition of software on a different axis from commercial proprietary and free (freedom) software, but I bet if you look at the contributor lists for lots of popular open-source/free (freedom) software, you'll find long lists of European contributors.
edit after review I've realized there's more German contribution to my software history than I expected, sorry Germans!
Also, glad to see lots of folks jumping up and calling out some great German softs.
Ableton Live Native Instruments Steinberg (since superceded by Ableton)
There's a pretty large body of German music software developers, both large and indie.
If I recall Logic (now Apple) was also German, and there are a number of other good European music software companies like Propellerheads.
I'd add Celemony to that list as well.
Yeah, Scream Tacker III was made by demogroup Futurecrew, from which some went on to start Remedy Entertainment (Max Payne, Alan Wake) and other companies. Fast Tracker 2 was made by demogroup Triton, from which some went on to start Starbreeze Studios (Chronicles of Riddick/The Darkness). Also DICE (Battlefield series) has demoscene roots in the form of The Silents. Even Rovio (Angry Birds) got started after winning some compo at Assembly.
I wrote a semi-clone of it in Qbasic (learning a bit about 3D projection on the way). I later ported it naïvely to Python and it ran slower. :D
Brought back some fond memories, and I hadn't heard about Renoise before ...
Another important question is what counts as software revenue in the first place. What about London's heavily software based financial services? What about software embedded in Germany's massive industrial exports?
A more comprehensive list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_companies_of_...
Protools by way of comparison runs about $800-1000 depending on the package (the version upgrade to 10 runs $300-400).
As a consumer I'm very glad that Renoise is only $80, but I can't help but wonder if they might be taken more seriously in the pro-music industry if they just sold the same product for $500, and they might make a great deal more money.
"Measured in software revenues, Ericsson is the world’s fifth largest software company."
http://www.ericsson.com/thecompany/investors/financial_repor...
(Further examples would be highly appreciated.)
Given that SAP is quirky (to say the least) it typically requires some real world experience.
When I encountered SAP, it was still the SAPGUI client that you installed on Windows. As I exited my SAP-related job, I believe the change to Web/Netweaver was beginning to happen. I've written a few ABAP programs and 1 or 2 BSP pages. The way I'd describe SAP to someone who hasn't ever used it, is like a very complex & powerful database with many stored-procedures and triggers and functions and special forms(screens) to accept user-input for each of them.
I've been hunting for something that is a well designed SaaS product, yet is highly scriptable with a great API to allow me to automate more of our transaction flow.
Right now we've got a part time book keeper whom spends most of her time copy and pasting things around in quickbooks, its just silly. Unfortunately we have a 'complicated' transaction flow, by 'complicated' I mean none of the ultra-simple SaaS models seems to allow modeling it correctly, but it could be done with a couple dozen lines of script if the software allowed that.
I'm currently stuck either keeping things as are, which sucks, or massively overpaying for SAP Business ByDesign to get the needed flexibility. It seems like there is a bit of a hole in the market between the ultra simple SaaS solutions and the SAP's of the world. It seems like NetSuite used to fill this gap but has moved up market.
Is Xero getting to the point where they can at least partially fill that hole? Anyone else out there that is close?
"Professor Hasso Plattner [co-founder of the global software company SAP and chairman of its supervisory board] has pledged the foundation from his private assets for the day-to-day running of the Institute over a period of more than 20 years. Due to his commitment, he is one of the most important private supporters of science in Germany."
Ironic? Visionary? Whatever it is, good work is being done, orthogonally to SAP's main venture.
Some aspects of the systems I work on have to communicate with SAP and I find the whole process quite frankly, bizarre. The way SAP names procedures is weird, it just seems so clunky.
Whenever the SAP team come to us to say they've added a new column and we need to support it makes me weep a bit when having to type in ZTRANS_TTP_ORDER_TYPE everywhere to support their bullshit.
>100lb gorilla
Seems fairly...light.
It generally works and at a very, very large scale.
The automotive industry is notorious for this but I also know of some small companies that were essentially forced to use SAP to even compete for contracts from some big companies (Bosch comes to mind)
ABAP is also fairly "consultant friendly" and extremly backwards compatible. Sometimes I jokingly call it the new Cobol. If you ever think "man my language of choice is pretty kludgy" feel free to look at some ABAP code/docs and you'll feel a lot better :P
Usually it works like this:
Specially trained sales people approach executives of a company with stable money flows. They tell all that nonsense about how prestigious SAP is, that all successful businesses runs SAP, that it is kind of a simbol of maturity of the company and that it having SAP installed is good for IPO. Most of execs who have no idea what crap it is just agree.
For IT execs it is even better. SAP installs a ready bureaucracy system inside a company. All those meaningless titles, training, certificates, as if you really learn something valuable. Usually IT manager involved in running or supporting SAP have a guaranteed position, they say.
Needless to say, that they have a ready "processes" based on paper-pushing inside a newly formed hierarchy.
Now about software. It is worse crap ever. It is a mess of Java, inhouse ABAP layers, and thousands of SQL stored procedures with meaningless names.
All technical and troubleshutting documentation, which is crap, available only with paid subsribtion, explaining almost nothing. What is available for free PR, success stories and use cases, which is completely meaningless lies.
Software itself is a mess. There are hundreds of different version which are incompatible with each other, and only this version people know what to do.
All installations usually performed by stupid drones without any background using detailed instructions with screenshots of each step. Usually typical SAP "certified professional" know nothing but a few such instructions.
Support is much worse. Nobody know anything, all they do is finger-pointing. All problems usually solved with a new re-install and then import whatever data we have in last backup.
Data loses are normal thing. Bugs and gliches are normal. Incompetence is rampant. But SAP bill you for each hour of each consultant involved, and each document passed through system. May be even for each transaction.
After all crap is installed and organization are shaken up it is already too late and too costly to revert. This is why SAP is so "successful" - when you "invest" in it you are done for, and you just sign the bills and have your "signs of maturity".
This is only quick overview. I can write a brochure what a crap it is.)
And for consultants it's a definitely a great, stable and future proof moneymaker; if you are a freelancer with real-world experience (you worked on SAP in a biggish utility company for instance) then you can get hired whenever you want for insane amounts of money; E150-200 / hour, even in the current climate, is not an exception.
From a historical perspective though, 20-odd years ago large companies had their own massive in-house "concrete-ware" that ran on hugely expensive locked-in proprietary hardware with proprietary OS and DB, and huge cost and complexity of operation and changes.
SAP then offered R/3 which ran on whatever DB/OS/hardware brand you wanted. The other big difference was that it was multi-lingual and multi-currency and quite adaptable - and it had a GUI. It was so desirable - there was basically no competitors. All the bad points you mention were trivial in comparison to the benefits for a multi-national.
Now of course things are different. For starters, Mosaic and the web came along. SAP have tried to keep up with the amazing changes in ICT in the last 20 years but of course if you want to do that and remain profitable and look after your massive and diverse user base then things get complex. They haven't left anyone behind - there's been an upgrade path the whole time since the 70's and that's one thing at least that is admirable.
Full disclosure: I worked for SAP Research, but not on ERP systems.
But its a way to understand why SAP is like it is: the "core" you speak of is already fragmented and by chance, it can even happen that this core knowledge is invalidated by something further down the stack. Documentation of 100 edge cases wouldn't help you much in that regard. As others have stated, the oracle world is not much better in that respect.
Its a way to understand why anyone would even buy such "crap". Because thats the crap that solves the customers problem somehow and there is no competing company that would even come close to offering a similar service. I don't mean to imply that no one could ;).
> SAP implements the workflow of their costumers (the process is called "tailoring"),
No. It implements workflows that one of the consultancy layers comes up with after having meetings with the wrong-inhouse people, because in big corporations there's politics involved about who gets to be responsible for the future processes to be implemented, by newly formed departments, with managers and budget and so on.
I'd be the first guy to endorse the point that a central accounting, order, inventory-managing, ... system is indispensable for any big shop, but the current way of getting this kind of "mission critical" software into big corporations is just a huge clusterfuck. Office politics more or less guarantee that the system will sabotage the work of the majority of employees, and I cannot even blame SAP for that ;-).
I worked in a >10'000 people engineering company (huge industrial plants) for three years which matches roughly the timeframe that SAP was introduced. I've witnessed pretty hillarious in-house advertising campaigns (video clips, posters, giveaways, mascots) to raise acceptance of the new software and meaningless presentations justifying millions of wasted $ (€) offset by future increase of efficiency. There were funny titles given to specially trained ("power user", I'm not kidding you) colleagues and in the end, complete confusion about how to work with what was given and a inhouse support staff no longer able to cope with all the problems after the hive of consultants, trainers and specialists went to assault the next company.
We had it all: Three digit months-entry fields, to be able to cope with future expansions (not kidding), thousands of people trained in creating multi-billion-dollar-project structures inside SAP, yet unable to order a €10 part. Billable-hour forms with a complicated permission hierarchy, that nevertheless did not detect people charge other random accounts, sometimes by accident.
In the end people developed mitigation strategies, so work can continue with only minor handicaps, inhouse departments get praised for "successful" implementation of the systems, rewards are paid out, but a lot of the promised advantages fail to materialize.
If you have an error in your program, your editor crashes. You have to start a new editor instance by wrangling through a dozen submenus and entering cryptic commands.
The guy overseeing the course said "Yeah, just open a few backup instances of the editor beforehand."
Just run the program in another session.
The point is that even the instructor didn't know how solve the problem and that the default behavior is not exactly developer friendly.