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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)

#261

Post by KptMarchewa »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #113
rjzzleep wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, Jira is popular because it's flexible. You can customize Jira to fit any process. That flexibility comes with a price tag, which is performance. SAP is a complete opposite, a truly inflexible “my way or highway” type of system.

Going to copy my older comment:

One very large video game studio has tons of automation for Jira. Imagine someone deciding to add new weapon. The automation creates 100s of tasks for concept artists, 3d artists, animators, sound artists, software developers with complex dependencies better those. Most importantly, automation creates multiple QA steps for each element of completed work.

The same exists for levels, enemies, quests and tons of other elements.

I would not be surprised if a lot of studios had similar workflows.

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

#262

Post by JackFr »

pid-1 wrote: post #230
JackFr wrote: post #90

They also own Sybase. (For those who don’t know Sybase supports an SQL implementation which is seemingly used nowhere except sales and trading for Wall Street banks, who largely adopted it in the 90’s and have been slow to move off. MS SQL Server was originally a port of Sybase.)

I've seen Sybase being used by a product sold to telecom operators. If I understand correctly it's most important feature was doing distributed in memory analytics before stuff like Spark or Presto existed.

Well they do also have a columnar product SybaseIQ that actually has some adoption. But if that was ASE, their SQL server that would be the first I’d heard of in like 15 years.

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

#263

Post by jiggawatts »

jve wrote: post #214

I'm glad I'm seeing some SAP post on HN frontpage. Why? When my sister started to working at SAP working on documentation, I had to look at some of those. I noticed something like SAPUI5 and thought: hey, this looks pretty modern and nice and something that competes with Microsoft offerings! https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/#/topic/8b49fc198bf04b2d980... Then I see them documenting/pushing people in CI/CD direction (…

SAP targets ERP, and basically nothing else. You will never[1] see SAP HANA used outside of a SAP deployment, even though it is a general purpose in-memory database with some nice features. Similarly, you never see SAP ABAP used outside of a SAP deployment.

Microsoft targets the most generic use-cases possible, even more so than, say, Linux. You can do anything[2] with Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Azure, etc...

[1] For some values of never. [2] For some values of anything.

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

#264

Post by sph »

ornornor wrote: post #200
lqet wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, they introduced SAP elsewhere in the company, and it became difficult/too expensive to manage the communication between the old system and the SAP system. I can imagine too well how the conversation between the SAP people and the company went because I also took part in similar conversations with clients in a previous job a long time ago: client asks you if software X can do thing Y. Both you and the person re…

> The complexity of the task is eventually discovered in production. I’m amazed that this is what happens every. Single. Time. And yet we plow ahead with this kind of projects like we have no idea it’s the usual outcome. A couple years and millions over budget later, we rediscover this axiom. I really don’t get it. And try to warn about this, you’re labeled as not a team player or whatever and paint crosshairs on you…

The guy making a deal with SAP and their revolutionary solution is a few steps removed from the poor technician/engineer that is aware of how many corner cases the business runs on. This is why every company with at least 2 levels of hierarchy is doomed to repeat this costly mistake.

This is what big corp suppliers like IBM, Oracle or SAP thrive on. CEOs and executives not actually knowing the intricacies of their company, and underestimating the risk of creating a very expensive second system effect.

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

#265

Post by Eumenes »

threatripper wrote: post #174
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…

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.

One of my first recruiting jobs was hiring ERP consultants (SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle) and even 15 years ago, these people were easily making $100/hr, and if you were specialized (esp. with the supply chain modules), you could get up to $200/hr. They rarely had programming skills outside of SQL and Linux understanding.

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

#266

Post by shigawire »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #237
hef19898 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it how UX is so much more important than actual funtionality. I blame Instagram, Apple and consumer apps in general for that.

I don't see why you'd split the two. Actual good functionality is UX. Lack of good functionality implies the user has a bad experience given the intended goal. Big players tend to do the minimum, either attracting with shiny red herrings or barely doing anything at all. Both are bad UX.

From talking to actual end users though I am convinced there is no universally good UX. Someone will not understand it no matter how perfect you think it is.

Now I favor ugly but robust UX for business applications. The user doesn't have to love it, it's their job to use it. It just has to be efficient and comprehensive, not pretty

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

#267

Post by jiggawatts »

probably_wrong wrote: post #21

Whenever I read about SAP (which I hate, so don't mistake this for an objective take) it reminds me of the discussion about self-hosting your email: "Oh, no, it's too complicated, you are better off paying someone else to do it for you". The problem being, I host my own email and it works fine , which makes me suspicious of the common takes about ERP too. Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in…

As an example of this, I was at a large government department that was in the middle of a mainframe operating system upgrade project. Not the hardware! The applications were also largely staying as-is. Their budget was two billion dollars, which just blew my mind.

I was chatting with a member of the small army of project managers involved, and I was trying to explain to him that for that kind of money I'll build them a whole new mainframe from sand. Silicon, circuitry, operating system, applications, everything.

For two billion dollars you could literally afford to build a dedicated foundry just to stamp out the sheetmetal for the case and still have 1.9 billion left over for everything else.

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

#268

Post by cptaj »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #160
jwr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true! As the author of a (small) ERP/MRP SaaS, I am often amused when I read HN and observe the thundering herds of fashion followers — today it's Kubernetes and Rust, Postgres and sqlite have a longer lifespan, but tomorrow it's going to be something else entirely, and you necessarily need to use those :-)

I am always thinking about Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" and computer archeology: there is an accumulation of the code base and at some point most code will be some kind of legacy. It is not feasible to rewrite it in the fancy language/technology du jour - huge waste of resources for things which already work fine and at the moment you are done you have to start again, since the IT-pendulum is traveling in the oppo…

I absolutely loved that aspect of the book and how it eventually affects the plot

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

#269

Post by caseymarquis »

As an outside company without a relationship with SAP, what's the best way to build integrations with it? What's the path? How do we get access to sandbox environments, and will it cost money? I figured I'd selfishly ask while this is number one on HN and all the SAP gurus are here!

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

#270

Post by wvh »

SAP software is the Jira for non-IT software. A slow corporate mess nobody wants to log in to until your boss complains you haven't fill out the SAP thing, so you sigh and try to accept the fact, go in there and try to get it done before life becomes totally dark and unbearable.

Most are only exposed to SAP software for time allocations, travel arrangements and expense management, but I imagine there's some poor souls in the account department who have to spend a large part of their day suffering it. It's something you probably won't encounter in small companies, but seems inevitable in large companies and organisations at least in Europe.

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