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What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

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Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#121

Post by gotstad »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #98
wheels wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, I worked in R&D at SAP for 4 years (16 years ago), but I have no deep love for it. But I do have some understanding of where it fits in the landscape. What you've said is absolutely true, but it's mostly a feature, not a bug. Once you get big enough to need SAP, it's actually useful to put your business processes on a standardized platform. It's painful, always mind bendingl…

I have to disagree here strongly. You are just saying, that a company that became big enough, so it can afford SAP, should drop their way of doing business, drop the processes that made it big in the first place and go through a painful and expensive process where it will become just another SAP shop, with zero competitive advantage. Telling that losing your uniqueness and being like “everyone else” will actually bec…

That needs some nuances. There are some processes that are just well-known by research to be standardized - like supply-chain, regardless if JIT-style or forecasted stockkeeping.

SAP does not need to touch the "unique" detailed processes that makes a company great, nor it's culture. But if you e.g. manufacture a product, the design process can still be relatively unique to your company, but most often, the manufacturing processes should follow the high-level blueprint of manufacturing companies.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#122

Post by AmericanChopper »

zxienin wrote: post #46
danuker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can try customising SAP to fit your processes So you are paying hundreds of millions to get a canned, pre-packaged, inflexible solution? Why is SAP still in business? Is it solely customer misinformation?

> Why is SAP still in business? Very hard to throw/replace ERP. It might happen but it‘ll take decades for global SAP installed base to shrink seriously. > Is it solely customer misinformation? SAP (and other „enterprise sales“ players) sold to CIO with „account relationships“. Then software is shoved down the throat of business users.

I once consulted for a place that had one seperate ERP for each acquisition or merger they’d had in the past few decades. They all had projects in progress to decommission/merge them back down to one, but they were never able to turn a single one of them off.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#123

Post by robertlagrant »

roydivision wrote: post #92
meibo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

The UI isn’t just terrible, it’s hostile to the user. The rare times I am forced to interact with it I feel like I’m using software that was meant for some other purpose. I’ve worked in the industry for 25 years, I’ve never come across worse UI.

My favourite bit of the SAP UI is whenever you scroll a listbox, it goes back to the server to load the rest of the list. It only has data for the exact 5 items it's showing; the other 1 above or 3 below each need a server hit. And it forgets the data it loaded before.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#124

Post by singingfish »

meibo wrote: post #59
_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

I think ERPs are a basket case category generally. I've worked with SAP for a few years (or more accurately work hard to keep it out of scope for what I do) in my day job. I've also worked for a company providing ERP stuff for SMEs (mostly S).

Anyway SAP/ERPs aren't code for running your business. They're code for running code to run your business. Now you have all the shortcuts SAP made to get stuff out the door, and on top of that you've got all the layers of shortcuts your business has made to get things out the door too. Therefore lots of nasty difficult complexity.

And finally I've seen evidence that in SAP people treat it like the fundamental abstraction layer is the spreadsheet[1]. So like in unix everything is a file, in SAP everything is a spreadsheet. This is a nasty complicated fundamental abstraction without the natural elegance of Unix's one.

[1] Maybe it really is, maybe it isn't but that's how a large chunk of the ABAP code I've seen treats it.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#125

Post by felixg3 »

davidkunz wrote: post #96
_glass wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:D You can run SAP in the cloud on Kubernetes: https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma Also you can re-write everything in Rust https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part...

Ah, that's my blog post :)

Wow, impressive CV. 1.0 at KIT! Grüße nach Karlsruhe.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#126

Post by jasode »

_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

>, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s.

Yes, the scope of ERP and SAP is so immense that even other software companies that have competency in the business of programming also buy SAP licenses instead of coding their own home-grown ERP system.

E.g. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google all run SAP.

Microsoft even has their own ERP software (Dynamics GP acquired from Great Plains Software) and yet they run SAP. Microsoft sells Dynamics GP to mid-tier businesses but they don't use it internally for the consolidated financial accounting of their complex multinational business.

And in an interview about Google's early days, one of the employees recommended that they install ERP system like SAP and co-founder Sergei Brin was skeptical saying "Why would they need to buy that when their programmers could just code it themselves?!?" Well, Google did eventually buy Oracle Financials ERP and then eventually switched to SAP: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+migrates+oracle+finan...

If you're a brand new YC startup, you're not going to need a complex behemoth like SAP ERP. Maybe Quickbooks or some SaaS service for accounting & HR/Payroll is all you need. However, if the business grows enough (i.e. multinational), you'd be wasting money by paying your own staff programmers to re-invent what SAP already does. Just pay the millions in SAP licenses. It's expensive but still cheaper than trying to do it yourself.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#127

Post by ilitirit »

_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

> it's getting better.

This should be the SAP tagline. I swear I've heard this since I started working with SAP in maybe 2009(?) as well - I had a brief stint as an ABAP developer.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#128

Post by Aeolun »

meibo wrote: post #59
_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

I kinda feel like SAP is the ultimate in checkbox checking. If you ask every department what they need, and write it all down, then find the product that matches all the checkboxes, SAP is it.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#129

Post by taway19920706 »

carstenhag wrote: post #39
gadders wrote: post #13

I worked on a SAP project for a Legal Entity Creation/Staff Migration in the HR piece. Technology wise, it's weird. It reminds me a bit of Lotus Notes, in that everything including the screen layouts are stored in the database.

Afaik all ABAP code is stored in the database and run from there as well.

Indeed it is. Even when using other development tools (eg, ABAP in Eclipse or the third-party addons for VS Code), the code is still stored in the database and executed from there by the ABAP VM. There's no such thing as "offline development" with SAP ABAP, although people are working on it...

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#130

Post by moss2 »

fabfabfab wrote: post #64
_glass wrote: post #27

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity espec…

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

Almost right. The conference rooms would be glasswalled and have funny names, but no one would be there because everyone is working from home.
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