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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)

#331

Post by taway19920706 »

JackFr wrote: post #262
pid-1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trivia time...

Back in the 90s Sybase was the only "major" database that SAP didn't support, ostensibly because it didn't support row-level locking, only page-level. Support for SQL Server 6.5 was added in 1993/1994 with the assistance of Microsoft (SQL Server also only supported page-level locking at the time and was still based largely on Sybase). Sybase ASE was only supported by SAP many years later, after they'd bought the company (primarily, I believe for the now-discontinued mobile products).

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

#332

Post by speakfreely »

PeterStuer wrote: post #246
forinti wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

Their most succesfull salespitch to the CEO is that you're not a real company untill you join the SAP club.

Salesforce uses this one, too.

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

#333

Post by veltas »

RNAlfons wrote: post #322
irrational wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

The reason is that their own people become exchangeable if you switch to something of the shelf.

Joke's on them, SAP is different everywhere.

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

#334

Post by sumedh »

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…

> I'm looking at you JIRA...

I always see this comment on HN, I think I have been using Jira for a decade, never really had any major complaints.

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

#335

Post by modo_mario »

ssdspoimdsjvv wrote: post #193
forinti wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

In-house tooling requires a dedicated team, not just developers but also analysts, testers, etc. Often a company inside the company. If the software needs to change due to industry changes or regulations or something like that, it will probably be a lot more expensive to implement it yourself compared to using an off-the-shelf tool developed by a company who's sole purpose it is to respond to those kind of changes.

>it will probably be a lot more expensive to implement it yourself compared to using an off-the-shelf tool developed by a company who's sole purpose it is to respond to those kind of changes.

If your company is small or at least in a field with lots of competition sure. I work in a >100person company that encounters loads of regulatory changes due to food safety and lots of international trade and 2 people developing is good enough. The part doing the accounting and such is largely outsourced to an ERP but is honestly simpler yet just as costly if not more.

What's more things go wrong. That's a given and the absolute best way to deal with it is with someone as close to the processes as possible. you don't want to be calling vendors that are generally absent to see in which part the software lies. Even for industrial equipment that is a lot more single process it is kind of accepted that we people on the ground need to know a good bunch to troubleshoot ourselves rather than paying someone to come over. After all if we wait for that we get a bottleneck that has dozens of people twiddling their thumbs.

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

#336

Post by [deleted] »

PeterStuer wrote: post #240
hef19898 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the duration of the ERP project, SAP is not different to any other vendor in that regard, from preparation through hyoer care after go live, yes. Yes, you have 3-5 expensive SAP, or other ERP system, consultants sitting next one internal IT guy and another 3-5 internal business people with a very deep understanding of the business processes in question and solid basic knowledge about ERP systems. Otherwise you se…

"'sitting next one internal IT guy and another 3-5 internal business people with a very deep understanding of the business processes in question and solid basic knowledge about ERP systems"' Where do you think the customer is going to find that army of hyper competent experienced staff ideling around their premisess waiting for the day an SAP project drops?

[deleted]

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

#337

Post by targafarian »

irrational wrote: post #318
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…

I work on a home grown solution at work, but they are considering abandoning it for a third party system that everyone we talk to says is inferior in every way. For some reason, the higher ups trust software built by someone else rather than their own people.

Marketing is a helluva drug. People are trained to trust big companies and the bigger the company the more they trust it. I think the issue is the variance in solutions if you compare all the homegrown solutions against all the big company solutions. And that gets managers into the mindset that there's less risk in a generic big company solution. But of course that misses all the details for a specific case like yours.

It would be like interacting with other people who knew based on the average of everyone on Earth as opposed to dealing with the person you knew based on their own personality.

But it's easy to manage based on these kinds of broad generalities and, as the saying at least once went, no one gets fired for choosing IBM.

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

#338

Post by KptMarchewa »

Matl wrote: post #280
KptMarchewa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ene…

That may be true for certain industries, but a lot of shops work on CRUD apps and use Jira in its fairly stock configuration. Linear or something like that could do the same job for them just fine.

Sure, there's lot of Jira use where something more lightweight would suffice. That does not mean Jira does not have its uses.

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

#339

Post by psidium »

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 (…

For all the documentation you see surrounding SAPUI5, it is very incomplete when you have to actually use it do develop something.

It is built on top of jQuery and extremely slow. They are very adamant on MVC with two-way databinding (the opposite of React or most other frontend libraries that have been around for almost 10 years). The backend request is geared toward OData (think graphql but table-oriented), and adding logic between the UI and the OData endpoint is hard.

SAPUI5 is hard to use even for a mediocre screen need. It aims to get the simple apps really simple to write (to lower development cost), but at that it kills the productivity of all the other apps.

Getting back to documentation, after your app is not just some components living in logical islands but have to interact with one another (think getting data from one place to drive another component) most of the time the documentation did not help with that, and I had to resort to debug the whole library internally to understand it.

Add all that to the fact that they don’t even care to support firefox for non-windows users bah

It is really understandable why no one but SAP uses this library. It was made for one use case by sap for sap and that’s it.

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

#340

Post by hef19898 »

sotix wrote: post #310

I worked in public accounting with some major corporations as clients. Every single company I interacted with used SAP. It is the de facto software in its field and is deeply entrenched. Its UX is the most horribly wicked thing I’ve ever come across. We would conduct walkthroughs with process control owners that showed us what they would do in SAP to perform their job functions, and it would take multiple, intelligen…

One of the reasons why ERP systems were ao sucessful is because they replaced the majority of administrative jobs by automating them away. One of the results is that those remaining are either highly knowledgable and skilled, or working in a function that has yet to be automated away or outsourced to a cheaper country in that specific company.
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