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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)

#371

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

All of these kinds of systems are the same, from financial systems, like SAP and Oracle, to things engineering systems, like Teamworks and Integrity/Windchill. (I've worked on Oracle and SDRC.) Their size makes them impervious to change, and their complexity leads to ridiculous workflows.

I've made a living writing custom software for engineering, embedded with engineers, that fixes problems with these monstrous systems, and which IT could never implement in 100 years.

So, yes, companies with CIO's who want to make a name for themselves (and probably collect a kickback in the process): PLEASE continue to implement these hundred-million dollar IT systems. You MAKE a lot of extra work in the process, guaranteeing job security for everyone who has to use them, and work around them.

You'd think that Fortune 100 companies would put people into positions like the CIO or CTO who are sharp enough to understand how this REALLY works out, but I guess those kinds of people aren't politically savvy enough to reach that position.

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

#372

Post by NamTaf »

mdip wrote: post #253
_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…

After participating in the hiring of an SAP developer I realized -- financially speaking, anyway -- that I picked the wrong thing to specialize in. The first time we brought in someone truly experienced in SAP development, we paid him more than any other developer on staff[0]. I appreciate the different take on SAP. Can I ask -- is it still as lucrative to be an SAP developer? [0] This was a global multi-national tel…

SAP developers aren't paid because they're more talented than other developers, they're paid because the niche in which they're deeply embedded extracts extreme business value.

It may take just as much talent to write interfaces for obscure audio hardware and deal with janky bluetooth edge cases, but that doesn't mint the same $$$$ as a SAP guru who refactors a business process to be more efficient.

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

#373

Post by nradov »

cholantesh wrote: post #370
ethbr0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative , especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose too…

Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?

Oracle has a whole suite of competing products. (This is not an endorsement of either vendor.)

https://www.oracle.com/applications/

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

#374

Post by loudmax »

jiggawatts wrote: post #158
theshrike79 wrote: post #10

This is a good time to remind everyone of the rules of SAP integration: 1) Your company processes MUST adapt to SAP processes. That's it. You can try customising SAP to fit your processes, but you will just waste time and hundreds of millions of money and then you will fail. Lidl spent almost a decade and 500M€ on its SAP project, but didn't follow rule #1: https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d…

Reminds me of large government departments where some idiot in the IT architecture team says: "Woah there buddy! Why do you think it's safe to assume that Microsoft Office is what we're going to use? What if we decide to use Open Office?" That's maybe one or two words away from a literal conversation in a huge meeting with dozens of high-level IT staff overseeing an org with 30K staff and a petabyte of existing Micro…

Pretty amazing that some people still believe that choice exists rather than submitting to the monopoly. That's a petabyte of files locked into a proprietary format. The smart thing to do is bow down to the monopoly. Only an idiot would try to shift the balance of power back to the users.

Imagine what wiring an office building would be like if all the wires, circuit breakers and tools could only be bought from a single vendor. Boggles the mind.

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

#375

Post by jjslocum3 »

cholantesh wrote: post #370
ethbr0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative , especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose too…

Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?

Siebel is a meaningful competitor to SAP

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

#376

Post by political12345 »

qorrect wrote: post #364
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP, Excel, and Bloomberg Terminal are applications where there such a long tail of uses that it is hard to see them being replaced in the corporate world anytime soon.

Bloomberg Terminal really ? I've never gotten to use it, what can it do ?

more money is traded through bloomberg termimal than the market capitalisation or SAP... per day

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

#377

Post by tru3_power »

cholantesh wrote: post #370
ethbr0 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People underestimate how much SAP is doing behind the scenes when properly configured. And beyond that, they overestimate the ergonomics of any enterprise alternative , especially ones that pre-dated SAP. For every "We had a great internal platform that we custom built" story, there are multiple "We used a small vendor's product, and it was a nightmare." Why is SAP successful? Because the general purpose too…

Are there really no meaningful competitors to SAP in this space?

ServiceNow is one that comes to mind

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

#378

Post by dandare »

greedo wrote: post #358
pilsetnieks wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

The simplest explanation is a mis-alignment in incentives. Executives want to have successful projects to show to their value to an organization. But usually the board members are unable to comprehend the details of a project. So the herd mentality kicks in. The CTO will seek approval for SAP and provide Gartner magic quadrant BS to give the board a level of comfort. Now whether SAP is the right tool, or if it inconv…

This.

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

#379

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> I feel there is a lot of room to develop better tools that are not so horrid, however, the process for replacing SAP will be long and close to impossible.

Personally, I rather liked the approach that Oodoo takes: https://www.odoo.com/

It tries to be pretty modular and even the cloud hosted plans can be mixed and matched, in addition to which the apps can be self-hosted for free: https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps

Of course, attempting to compare it to something like SAP is a bit like comparing OpenProject with Jira or something along those lines: where one of the solutions is way more popular and recognizable, even if the other could be serviceable in certain scenarios. It's pretty clear which one will be picked by most of the enterprises, though.

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

#380

Post by Tokkemon »

sumedh wrote: post #334
undreren wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right! Jira's pretty great. Sure it's clunky sometimes, especially with it's bastardized version of SQL, but whatever, it's non-coder friendly.
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