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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)

#181

Post by taway19920706 »

wheels wrote: post #155
lqet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly I am intrigued - you mean terminal output is actually parsed, and a GUI view is then generated from it? E: this would certainly explain the issue of listboxes only having the currently shown items loaded (described by another commenter) - everytime you scroll, the terminal output has to be produced + parsed again

Historically, yes. It was basically like translating an ncurses (semi-GUI command line thing) into a UI. There were attempts to move away from that model, but at least when I worked for SAP, most actual deployments were still text-to-UI. It was basically a way of slapping some varnish on what was fundamentally an old-school mainframe system.

It's the same today - S/4HANA is still accessible from the GUI and DIAG is still used. Web applications (which SAP is pushing customers towards) are freed from this, of course (they talk native http to the SAP application server).

Remember that back in the late 90s SAP had a native GUI that ran on Windows, OS/2 and Unix (Motif-based) and each had their own native controls (a native Windows listbox is implemented differently from a Motif one, for example). Developers would develop a UI in ABAP with platform-independent controls and that UI would be sent over the wire to the client as DIAG and the client would translate that into the native control and data, etc for the end user.

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

#182

Post by julienfr112 »

lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

SAP embed in the software knowledge and enforcement of the organization the company should have. This knowledge that build in the last 30 years by working in logistic, manufacturing, retail... When you install SAP, you should obey SAP, like I don't know, rust (don't try to do c++ in rust ;-) ... If SAP has nothing to say about organization at a Lab, just don't by SAP.

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

#183

Post by pilsetnieks »

dandare wrote: post #74
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 UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

> The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying

I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain that things don't work or if they do, it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort?

Surely there must be some other explanation for the proliferation of these systems other than "execs dumb and bad"?

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

#184

Post by ehnto »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #117
dandare wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

I hate how bad UX has become the standard due to management/executive negligence, and there is so little the actual users can do about it. Even small players tend to neglect UX because of the financial incentives.

I find smaller companies can have a more direct connection to their users, so the outcome is usually better UX. The disconnect from the user in enterprise software regularly results in poor UX, and the incentives to improve it just don't make their way to the people who need to hear them.

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

#185

Post by Jenk »

davidkunz wrote: post #147
lycopodiopsida wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greetings to a NeoVIM user from an Emacs/evil user. There are at least two users at the same company who dislike VSCode with some passion :)

Emacs and (Neo)vim users, unite!

We did!

https://github.com/NTBBloodBath/doom-nvim

https://spacevim.org/

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

#186

Post by theshrike79 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #88
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?

It's the same reason why Jira is so popular. CIOs recommend it to each other, because nobody wants to admit they made a mistake and that it wasn't as easy to integrate in the end after all. It's like getting a nose surgery and telling all your friends to get one as well. In most cases people look worse afterwards. It's funny to see people here defending SAP, because the way I see even the smaller shops that did bend…

Jira is perfectly fine, especially if you self-host it so you're not limited by the crappy Atlassian cloud server capacity.

BUT the problem is that Jira is infinitely configurable. Add 20+ projects with 20+ project managers/leads who want to do things Their Way and you've got a clusterfuck on your hands. Every project has different terminology, different workflows and different ways of handling the same types of projects.

What Jira needs is a single (benevolent) dictator who is the gatekeeper of adding new workflows, tags etc. Then it works.

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

#187

Post by mr_gibbins »

avereveard wrote: post #180
threatripper wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably cheaped out on SAP consultants. Each of the old IT staff in the old system you can replace with 3-5 SAP consultants.

SAP is better though as a set of libraries than a solution, and it's worth a lot precisely because it will fit whatever whacky process an organization has so that the org doesn't need to change itself while adopting the software. The most obvious failure modes are going for the lowest bidders incentivizing them to deliver with a skeleton crew, trying to nickel and dime the budget cutting features or their scope or st…

I taught enterprise systems for a while and SAP's ethos is very much 'change your business processes to fit SAP, because if they don't fit SAP, they're probably wrong'. This is actual advice (in slightly different wording) that comes from their training materials.

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

#188

Post by mardifoufs »

fileeditview wrote: post #94
734129837261 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote you can be agile if you move to the cloud. Did you try that? I jest. But that's kind of the point. SAP is terrible by the nature of the beast. It's a closed off system with specialised developers who require all sorts of expensive certifications. That doesn't make for good developers, that makes for pigeon-holed developers who don't have a lot of competition. A terrible SAP developer with all the certifica…

I think you don't see the full picture here. The developers working for SAP usually don't need any certifications. They are regular computer scientists/physicists/mathematicians etc. who write code / design systems. There are of course the certified consultants that work for clients of SAP. I can however understand why they need certifications. It's probably impossible to configure these systems without some kind of…

I think they were talking about "front end" SAP devs that are hired to work on custom solutions by a client. Not the core devs that actually work for SAP on building the product itself.

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

#189

Post by taway19920706 »

IceDane wrote: post #87

I work in the SAP industry as a consultant, but I hardly ever work directly with SAP. In fact, I work in a dept. whose primary purpose is to do all the non-SAP work, so 99% of the time I'm working with your typical modern stack(that I get to pick myself, usually), like nodejs/graphql/typescript, etc. I do however often work adjacent to SAP or have to integrate with it, and since I've been at this for a few years now,…

Agree 100% - NIH is a huge thing with SAP, along with very often picking the wrong horse (Silverlight anyone?). They've also built their new PaaS using Cloud Foundry, which I'm not certain about...

I'm glad that someone else feels the same way I do about OData and UI5. I've used both extensively (initially to learn more about them and then because I need to develop solutions that can be supported by customers) and neither is, well, ideal. The worst is that the SAP ecosystem is a massive echo chamber, filled with fanboys saying how wonderful OData and UI5 are. Really, they're not - UI5 is open source and yet no-one uses it. Why? And let me not get started with CAP (WTF did you give a product the same name as Brewer's theorem?).

There have been some attempts to extract some of the UI5 controls so that they can be used with React/Angular but I can't see those ever being adopted. I've worked with UI5 development teams that struggle with even getting the basics of Git and love using that godawful WebIDE, so I have no hope for customers being dragged away from SAP solutions to anything vaguely "industry standard".

Sorry for the negativitiy, but after 20+ years of SAP paying my bills (and paying them well), I'm even more cynical than ever.

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

#190

Post by noisy_boy »

undreren wrote: post #134
PeterStuer wrote: post #112

Some things you need to know: SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software. SAP is priced based on your company's revenue. In industry X typical spend on IT is y% of revenue, so SAP will charge you a project for an amount equal to y% of your revenue. SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but common for large proje…

> SAP is sold to the C=suit, never to IT or business operations, nor any of the people that will ever come onto contact with the software. Plenty of terrible corporate software works like this. Precurement has a checklist of features, and that list never includes "Has great UX", because only the people on the floor has to use it. I'm looking at you JIRA... > SAP project often fail (this is not specific to SAP but com…

> looking at you JIRA

I dunno. I find Jira pretty easy to use, like Git. Focus on the main fields/commands and open a new ticket/clone again if you mess up.

/s

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