Is that as in "Why is it worth only $163B?"
I have no idea what it is worth, but it is currently valued closer to $105B.
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)
#92I 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.
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.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#93ERP industry is so hard(painful) that I wouldnt want to work in it unless they paid top of the top Good luck competing in that industry > basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started. Gotta be fun :)
I always wondered, why wouldn't an in-house developed lean, ERP system would not trump a behemoth like SAP. A few reasons seem plausible. - No one gets fired for hiring SAP - Getting an in-house software developer team that can develop an easily extensible / modifiable ERP system is neigh impossible It is one of my dream to build an alternative ERP system. But it looks like sub-ERP functions (payroll, HR, etc) have b…
Not just developers, but lawyers, accountants, analysts... I think you grossly underestimate complexity of this thing.
We implemented relatively simple income tax reform a few decade ago in small EU jurisdiction. But law makers were very vague in some important details, and there were about 8 different interpretations. We had to implement, run and support all 8 versions for couple of years, until they decided on final interpretation. Non compliance would be fine of couple of million euro.
And that was tiny country of 5 million people with clean newly written laws. Not babylon with 300 years of baggage like US.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#94Earlier 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.
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 special education in them.
And as for the quality of SAP devs.. I work for SAP and I have met many very qualified developers at the company. Far more than I anticipated before joining the company. Quite a few have been poached by Google et al but that is another topic.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#95Earlier 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?
You can customise it, but you do need to stay within limits. If you go too far, a SAP version upgrade is no longer a drop-in operation, but rather a year long project of porting all your changes to the new version. If you stay as vanilla as possible, upgrades are a lot easier.
This. SAP has no restrictions on how much you customise it - you can customise and extend to your heart's content. The problems come during upgrade - SAP has very mature tooling to manage upgrades but a customer who has veered too far from standard will need to rework their customisations to fit the new version.
Many many customers have been burned by this over the years - being too trigger happy and customising/building their own extensions rather than using the out-the-box functionality. Packaged software exists for a reason, don't use it like a PaaS to built your own solutions.
SAP is now pushing customers to "keep the core clean" and stick to standard as much as possible, which is definitely a move in the right direction.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
: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 :)
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#97Curious: does SAP have modules for illegal activities, both dealing with it e.g, official bribes, internal corruption, employee theft, cyber ransoms etc, and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for "off the books accounting", special operations etc.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#98This 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…
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 become your competitive advantage is something that only SAP can come up with.
If you already grew big, you won't grow bigger by adopting SAP. You can stagnate at best, as shown a million times in the real world. Companies that still want to grow just don't use SAP. Period.
Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can customise it, but you do need to stay within limits. If you go too far, a SAP version upgrade is no longer a drop-in operation, but rather a year long project of porting all your changes to the new version. If you stay as vanilla as possible, upgrades are a lot easier.
This. SAP has no restrictions on how much you customise it - you can customise and extend to your heart's content. The problems come during upgrade - SAP has very mature tooling to manage upgrades but a customer who has veered too far from standard will need to rework their customisations to fit the new version. Many many customers have been burned by this over the years - being too trigger happy and customising/buil…
Fun with your comment:
s/SAP/Debian/g
s/mature/so-so/
s/customer/sucker/Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
#100I think the mistake with SAP, as with that other article about a modelling pyramid at Ikea, is assuming that it is possible to create one system to rule them all without it being extremely inefficient and expensive. It mirrors a dysfunctional business run on command-and-control rather than, like AWS, you have a large set of loosely affiliated teams and although you risk some duplication, it makes for much more agile…
This seems like an easy way for money and stuff to start going "missing".
One has to remember that many large companies don't have an in-house set of software engineers to kludge things together, or a set of people to audit and make sure problems aren't accumulating silently somewhere because of some bug or some vendor changing their API or whatever. Even if they did, the supposedly "agile" solution proposed here just sounds rather fragile. You even see this in codebases that are built on a "microservices" mindset -- you start getting weird emergent patterns in internal dependencies that start bogging things down.
For a smaller or even medium-sized business, sure, maybe a custom solution works. But it looks like for the scale of organization SAP works on, it seems difficult for an individual to even understand all the components of that organization, let alone build something maintainable for themselves and their eventual replacements.