What's SAP?

Except that instead of getting high powered modal editing actions where editing text behaves like executing code, you're stuck in insert and can only move by arrow keys, one at the time.

SAP is effectively open source, IIRC there were/still are options to install local development stacks for free... but without an army of experienced consultants it's gonna be useless for you and they won't touch a pirated/cloned system with a 10 feet pole.

While I get that sentiment I don't really see the ecosystem much worse than vendor lockin at any of the modern PaaS providers from a tech perspective. They always allowed integrators relatively extensive API access to their table model, last time I had to integrate that years ago the only hurdle was a bit of interfacing between the report / ABAP world and exposing it as a web service. Even management / security facilities were, albeit usually clunky, what you expect from a modern ecosystem. These days they seem to offer relatively modern and off the shelf APIs for quite a few of these tasks, especially for their cloud based offerings. I'm not sure that they see it as a threat, rather they want to be the single point of truth and lots of projects (completely separated from any tech aspect) would circumvent that.

Now was that a pain? Yes, sure. Especially the whole legal/certification/consultant crap you need to buy into alongside the software. But honestly, at least here in Germany, SAP ABAP/Java developers and consultants are easy to come by. Most of the problems I've seen in SAP related integrations are process related, not as much tech. If you're dealing with a customer that's already up and running in that ecosystem chances are that they already know their pain points, it's not really any different than any other large B2B integration in the space.

Did anyone see the news around extension of ECC6 support? To me it seemed like the logical decision.

SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples:

- Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this.

- Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge of how some technologies actually work.

- Services we rely on with SAP frequently fail for no apparent reason.

- They are slow and uncooperative with setting up demo environments and responding to support requests.

- Their licences and consulting fees are outrageously expensive considering the lack of quality and performance when compared to alternatives.

- Tech leads in our own company frequently talk about how bad SAP solutions are.

- Their poor UIs are what they are known for in the market. They've tried to address this with things like UI5, Fiori and Fundamentals which feel like too little too late.

- Their attempts at acquiring startups (AI, chatbots, analytics etc) to stay on the edge provide hardly any real value besides propping up the credibility of the buzzwords they cram into their presentations.

Yet SAP remain entrenched in the market and companies still get into bed with them despite knowing the pain they're in for. A lot of system integration companies have tried to attack this market with open source solutions and have failed to make any real dent. The only major player that has started to eat SAPs lunch recently is Salesforce.

Perhaps I'm missing something but surely it would be better for an organisation to have a solution that can be maintained by more than one company so that the company can be replaced if they aren't performing?

The only example I can think of where this is being addressed is the UK's GDS Service Standard which mandates that all government projects should use open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. It really is perplexing how SAP still maintains its position in today's market.