I think what you are saying can be true, depending on the sales exec. What can also be true is they are looking to build a long term relationship. It varies from person to person unfortunately.
What you describe is a classic large Systems Implementor problem, and that can be very true. The A-team sold the project and the B-team deliver it. They screw up the requirements gathering and the implementation. I've seen it happen many times.
Sometimes the product is to blame because it doesn't work as promised. Most of the time the consulting organisation didn't know the product well enough and made a mess of it. Totally agree on your contract point. Agree contracts, terms and conditions up front. Pay attention and take time.
Yes I am very lonely here, but it's interesting. I'd love to bring the tech and enterprise it crowds together and learn that we're really not that different.
Oracle is much worse from a sales/license perspective and a lot of my SAP customers are frustrated with them. Most of my customers have excellent relationships with their SAP account team.
On the ERP falling apart point - sorry but that's just not born out by fact. Project failures and system failures happen and most of the time that's caused by either using the wrong product, or by bad consulting - or poor support. I've never encountered a SAP ERP that has fallen apart.
SAP is a company with two CEOs - one sales and one technical, and they are definitely half a technology company. I really recommend you take a look at the tech they are producing. Of course they have to sell and market it - they have to turn a profit from all the R&D. Shame you have had a bad experience with the sales community.
It's true that SAP ERP could really do with a better interface (and it does, for the consumer end of the market by the way). But SAP ERP is bought by people who enjoy the business benefit (increased revenue, decreased cost) rather than by the users - that's life.
To say that SAP ERP doesn't scale on the other hand is a bit nuts. It scales easily to the biggest companies in the world. Apple iTunes Store sales billing runs on SAP.
I've not spent a lot of time looking at open source ERP in the context of large enterprise. I'd be interested in a serious comparison of the contenders and their UX, ability to scale to many countries/currencies/languages and their ROI and supportability and extensibility.
The answer is pretty simple: companies that implement ERPs save money and are more successful. It's the business change aspect that matters, and SAP enables that business change.
Totally agree with you on the UX nightmares, and this needs to be fixed. But if you look at SAP's new products, they are pretty interesting from a UX perspective. Design thinking is at the core of it. I really encourage you to take a look at for example http://www.experiencesaphana.com
SAP legal (like most large IT companies) has work to be done, and they know that. I hope they do something.
On the sales side your comments surprise me. I work with those guys on a regular basis and the vast majority are customer focussed: they have to be, or customers won't continue to buy. But this has changed a lot in the last 10 years.
SAP is rarely ripped out because it's rarely worth replacing systems of record. They are a long term investment, and most financial people are fine with SAP: it affords them control.
Can't argue - it was a reactionary response, such is the way of social media, right?
I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. HN readers perhaps might get some benefit from understanding SAP technologies and how they integrate into the stuff they want to hack with. I've employed some real hackers into the SAP market and it is a deeply interesting and open technology stack.
Come now, I didn't say that FB is insignificant. That would be ignoring the biggest social trend in the 21st century! What I'm saying is that the consumer press community spends 99% of its time talking about FB et al., who are interesting, cool but haven't got a proven commercial model, and 1% of the time talking about (and denigrating) SAP et al., who run the real software that makes businesses run.
And in the meantime, the global economy is going down the drain and Bubble 2.0 means that investors are throwing more of our savings down the drain. Some of the latest startup IPO valuations have been ridiculous.
Yes, my primary income is SAP consulting, but that doesn't mean I am not interested in wider IT issues. Facebook is a very relevant trend, but social media is a fickle partner, and the crown has changed hands several times already. Valuing it at 19x earnings is nuts.
Please do take a look at the innovations that SAP are doing. I look at wider market trends and I think what SAP is achieving in innovation is well beyond what Oracle/IBM/Microsoft/Google are doing right now. You may be surprised.
I would like to say a few things though, especially to those people who think that it's an us and them scenario.
First, I have personally spent a lot of time on open source software, and you will for example find some of my code in the Linux Kernel, if someone hasn't removed it by now.
Second, I think that closed communities are a bad thing, and it's something I strongly believe that SAP needs to get better at. Yes, SAP has the largest community network in the world with 3 million members. But it's not good enough at opening that up to the wider tech community, which is a loss.
Third, I think that integration to the wider tech community like HN, would be a huge benefit to Enterprise IT. We can be silo'd and the expertise of this group in writing nice-to-use apps is something we really need.
I think this is definitely traditionally true, and there are people making big bucks in the SAP space - contract rates can be high for geniuses.
What's changing is that open standards mean that the wider tech community can integrate into SAP. This both commoditises the business, drives rates down and makes it more accessible. I suspect that in 10 years time we will see a very different Enterprise IT market.
I hear you. SAP suck at that stuff. The problem with SAP is it's so complicated, you can do anything you like. And so, it becomes hard to explain. Not sure what the solution to that is.
SAP has a new CMO, Jonathan Becher, who I hope will bring some improvements to this stuff. Marketing is supposed to be about making stuff easier to buy - and as you rightly point out, SAP aren't always that good at that, especially to a casual observer.
Yes, Apple's iTunes store system of record runs on a custom SAP ABAP based system. It used to run SAP ERP but that could not take the load of transactions.
As I understand it, this is the reason why you get a weekly bill from Apple: the iTunes ABAP system makes financial postings to ERP, to reduce the overall number of transactions - and presumably also their credit card overhead.
I love the comments but this is exactly the stuff I was talking about in this article. I'd love to show the wider tech audience a bit more about SAP and how it works. Guess that can be my project for 2012.
1) Yes, you can download a trial version as Zalthor points out. I'm trying to work with SAP to make this more open and easy to do. It's important.
2) SAP customers vary from 1 employee (SAP BusinessOne) to 250,000+ employees (SAP ERP). But from a download perspective the interesting stuff is coming with Gateway and the Unwired Platform. With those tools - the server components of which will be available in the cloud - you can build Edge/Web Apps and Mobile apps using whatever tech you want. Ruby on Rails, iPhone, whatever. That's the sort of open integration which I hope will interest this audience, not downloading copies of SAP ERP for home.
3) Couldn't agree more, don't block social media at work. I wouldn't work for a company that did. By the way, SAP encourage social media and have 50k+ employees. But some organizations are stuck in the dark ages.
4) Streamworks integration is coming for the mainstream soon. It will be PaaS, integrated with the new Java environment and developer toolkit and supports open integration. It's had a bad press so far. Hopefully this will help.
Interesting comparison and let's be fair: Facebook's EBIT (which is the real financial comparison) is pretty decent. SAP's EBIT was pretty low in 2010 - expect it to increase in 2011 based on preliminary results.
Main point is FB's financial model isn't proven medium-term. Also SAP have a lot of low-cost employees in India/China. Hard to compare with FB really.
What you describe is a classic large Systems Implementor problem, and that can be very true. The A-team sold the project and the B-team deliver it. They screw up the requirements gathering and the implementation. I've seen it happen many times.
Sometimes the product is to blame because it doesn't work as promised. Most of the time the consulting organisation didn't know the product well enough and made a mess of it. Totally agree on your contract point. Agree contracts, terms and conditions up front. Pay attention and take time.