5 ms·

SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples: -

SAP today are just plainly incompetent and ripe for disruption. I've had quite a bit of interaction with SAP over the last few years, here are some examples: - Almost all meetings I've been in start with prospective clients mentioning to SAP consultants that SAP has a 'certain reputation'. The SAP consultants acknowledge this. - Some of the solution pitch ideas they come up with signal they have almost zero knowledge of how some technologies actually work. - Services we rely on with SAP frequently fail for no apparent reason. - They are slow and uncooperative with setting up demo environments and responding to support requests. - Their licences and consulting fees are outrageously expensive considering the lack of quality and performance when compared to alternatives. - Tech leads in our own company frequently talk about how bad SAP solutions are. - Their poor UIs are what they are known for in the market. They've tried to address this with things like UI5, Fiori and Fundamentals which feel like too little too late. - Their attempts at acquiring startups (AI, chatbots, analytics etc) to stay on the edge provide hardly any real value besides propping up the credibility of the buzzwords they cram into their presentations. Yet SAP remain entrenched in the market and companies still get into bed with them despite knowing the pain they're in for. A lot of system integration companies have tried to attack this market with open source solutions and have failed to make any real dent. The only major player that has started to eat SAPs lunch recently is Salesforce. Perhaps I'm missing something but surely it would be better for an organisation to have a solution that can be maintained by more than one company so that the company can be replaced if they aren't performing? The only example I can think of where this is being addressed is the UK's GDS Service Standard which mandates that all government projects should use open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. It really is perplexing how SAP still maintains its position in today's market.

9dev 7y ago
I suspect the only reason for their continued relevance is that they're too big to fail. So many huge enterprises rely on SAP, and its way too integrated into their core business processes to move off it at that point. Management elsewhere follows the larger players, and from what I've heard, SAP consultants are great at luring. Kind of like lemmings jumping the cliff.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  You should never discount the inherited biases of senior management. So many times I've seen a company implement SAP because the C-level employee in change of a software appraisal stage used SAP before, it worked before and just assume it will blindly work now.
orbifold 7y ago
It really is insane, I know people who don't even work for SAP, are "IT consultants", whose credentials are a (very good) Art History degree and travel around nationally and internationally to essentially push a button to do SAP database migrations after mergers and acquisitions. There are independent companies that just live off the fact how bad SAP is.
- schst 7y ago
  It must be a little bit more difficult than "pushing a button" if companies have to hire an external consultant for that. But yeah, SAP has huge ecosystem of external companies that profit from SAP's fails
  - pferde 7y ago
    It often really is just pushing a button. But you can never tell in advance, and the real value of such consultant is knowing how to fix whatever breaks if it does.
- schnevets 7y ago
  I am an IT Consulting (not with SAP) who has a Computer Science degree. I would not hesitate to hire a liberal arts major for a technical role in my company. Programming and analytical thinking is a tiny fraction of my job; most of it demands public speaking, organizational skills, and business relationship instincts. If these people work at a firm like Accenture that just outsources the technical challenge, coding skills become completely unnecessary. Also, a ton of the industry is built around the risk of something unexpected happening after you push the button (as mentioned below) and distributing blame if the end-result isn't precisely what customers anticipated (the old "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage) It may seem backwards to people outside of giant organizations, but it is a necessary aspect of modern business (and there are tons of industries that make more money while generating less value for society).
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Frankly, computer science knowledge and software abilities can be a real liability as an engineer. Many times what is needed is to let go of a sensible technical approach and just help the organization go where it is trying to go. It may not make sense technically, but it makes sense to the org, and that sort of matters more. I find my knowledge of good architecture often just makes it more painful to watch the code go through the inevitable logjams, rewrites, and process failures that are a crucial part of an organization “feeling” it’s way through a very complex multi-dimensional domain that includes many considerations that have nothing to do with code. I think in many ways, people with less technical skills can do that better, to live in the meta space. My brain keeps getting dragged down into the “why can’t we just do the sensible, minimal, technically correct thing that needs to happen for this problem to go away”. But the answer is “because the org doesn’t see the problem the way you do”. What good is it if I can solve problems no one else in the organization even recognizes as problems?
asmosoinio 7y ago
> ... when compared to alternatives. What do you see as the alternatives?
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Microsoft Dynamics, AX, JD Edwards, Netsuite, Oracle ERP, Sage, Salesforce, Syspro, IFS ERP. And a hundred other specialised systems which fit their niche markets. Not everyone needs a full stack ERP/FSM/CRM solution, their are almost as many players as variations in requirements.
  - djmobley 7y ago
    If you’re the kind of large organisation that is considering SAP, the only real competitor is Oracle, which is just as bad. The implementation of any ERP system is bound to be extremely painful. It’s big and complex and involves lots of change. You might as well pick one of the undisputed market leaders rather than have all that pain attributed to your decision to go with a niche player.
    - boomfus 7y ago
      I would agree with your criticisms of most of those companies as not being suitable for large companies, but I would argue Salesforce is definitely an option for large companies. I see job postings for Salesforce developers from companies like Google and Facebook all the time, and personally every company I've worked at as a Salesforce developer has been a Fortune 500 company.
- hef19898 7y ago
  In the logistics sector, transportation, warehousing, forwarding and so on, SAP isn't that strong. I started using Cargowise One in my company (started a couple of month ago, so ask me again next year how I like it!). Warehousing and transportation being things I would use solutions other than SAP and connect them to it. If I really need a MRP-function, that is.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
schnevets 7y ago
ServiceNow is another disruptor with an interesting approach similar to SalesForce. SNow started as a Remedy alternative, but really saw IT groups as the infrastructure that every other Department relies on. While SAP hold influence in a company by controlling the purse strings, a good ServiceNow implementation holds the Microservice and Technology information every group is reliant on. I'm not as familiar with SalesForce, but I think it has a similar stake by focusing on CRM. If you start at the customer data, you can influence the profit centers and influence a company that way. I mostly mention these success stories to say that a Goliath like SAP won't be taken down by one David, but by a ton of ankle-biters eating their lunch. Maybe these ankle-biters will be easily replaceable, but I wonder what an organization where Enterprise Software is constantly hot-swapped will look like, given how inefficient Application Retirement projects can be.
- whatsmyusername 7y ago
  ServiceNow is garbage. They're probably less garbage than working with SAP but they're still garbage.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bigger_cheese 7y ago
    No. The Industrial Plant I work at uses Service Now (For IT and Helpdesk support) and SAP (For Payroll, HR, Purchasing, Maintenance Scheduling etc.). Service Now is much, much worse. IT department is so dysfunctional and Service Now is a big part of that. One of my coworkers refers to it as "Service Eventually"
    - whatsmyusername 7y ago
      I'm amused by the amount of third parties (Sumologic for example) that have ServiceNow plugins. I'm curious what kind of usage metrics they have on the feature. I suspect it's just a feature parity/selling point but not actually used in practice, like EKS and managed SFTP on AWS. Nowhere I've worked that used ServiceNow encouraged solving practical problems with it. A grand total of once I took a crack at something that would have been trivial if Sumologic could alert to ServiceNow. It became hilariously obvious in 3 or 4 back and forth emails with the gatekeepers that their 3 month testing process, 45 emails, and 16 meetings requirement for a one line change was not cost effective. My time was better spent crafting an email forwarding rule that sent the related conversations to the trash and moving on to solvable problems.

9dev 7y ago

I suspect the only reason for their continued relevance is that they're too big to fail. So many huge enterprises rely on SAP, and its way too integrated into their core business processes to move off it at that point. Management elsewhere follows the larger players, and from what I've heard, SAP consultants are great at luring. Kind of like lemmings jumping the cliff.

swarnie_ 7y ago
You should never discount the inherited biases of senior management. So many times I've seen a company implement SAP because the C-level employee in change of a software appraisal stage used SAP before, it worked before and just assume it will blindly work now.

orbifold 7y ago

It really is insane, I know people who don't even work for SAP, are "IT consultants", whose credentials are a (very good) Art History degree and travel around nationally and internationally to essentially push a button to do SAP database migrations after mergers and acquisitions. There are independent companies that just live off the fact how bad SAP is.

schst 7y ago
It must be a little bit more difficult than "pushing a button" if companies have to hire an external consultant for that. But yeah, SAP has huge ecosystem of external companies that profit from SAP's fails
- pferde 7y ago
  It often really is just pushing a button. But you can never tell in advance, and the real value of such consultant is knowing how to fix whatever breaks if it does.
schnevets 7y ago
I am an IT Consulting (not with SAP) who has a Computer Science degree. I would not hesitate to hire a liberal arts major for a technical role in my company. Programming and analytical thinking is a tiny fraction of my job; most of it demands public speaking, organizational skills, and business relationship instincts. If these people work at a firm like Accenture that just outsources the technical challenge, coding skills become completely unnecessary. Also, a ton of the industry is built around the risk of something unexpected happening after you push the button (as mentioned below) and distributing blame if the end-result isn't precisely what customers anticipated (the old "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage) It may seem backwards to people outside of giant organizations, but it is a necessary aspect of modern business (and there are tons of industries that make more money while generating less value for society).
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Frankly, computer science knowledge and software abilities can be a real liability as an engineer. Many times what is needed is to let go of a sensible technical approach and just help the organization go where it is trying to go. It may not make sense technically, but it makes sense to the org, and that sort of matters more. I find my knowledge of good architecture often just makes it more painful to watch the code go through the inevitable logjams, rewrites, and process failures that are a crucial part of an organization “feeling” it’s way through a very complex multi-dimensional domain that includes many considerations that have nothing to do with code. I think in many ways, people with less technical skills can do that better, to live in the meta space. My brain keeps getting dragged down into the “why can’t we just do the sensible, minimal, technically correct thing that needs to happen for this problem to go away”. But the answer is “because the org doesn’t see the problem the way you do”. What good is it if I can solve problems no one else in the organization even recognizes as problems?

asmosoinio 7y ago

> ... when compared to alternatives. What do you see as the alternatives?

swarnie_ 7y ago
Microsoft Dynamics, AX, JD Edwards, Netsuite, Oracle ERP, Sage, Salesforce, Syspro, IFS ERP. And a hundred other specialised systems which fit their niche markets. Not everyone needs a full stack ERP/FSM/CRM solution, their are almost as many players as variations in requirements.
- djmobley 7y ago
  If you’re the kind of large organisation that is considering SAP, the only real competitor is Oracle, which is just as bad. The implementation of any ERP system is bound to be extremely painful. It’s big and complex and involves lots of change. You might as well pick one of the undisputed market leaders rather than have all that pain attributed to your decision to go with a niche player.
  - boomfus 7y ago
    I would agree with your criticisms of most of those companies as not being suitable for large companies, but I would argue Salesforce is definitely an option for large companies. I see job postings for Salesforce developers from companies like Google and Facebook all the time, and personally every company I've worked at as a Salesforce developer has been a Fortune 500 company.
hef19898 7y ago
In the logistics sector, transportation, warehousing, forwarding and so on, SAP isn't that strong. I started using Cargowise One in my company (started a couple of month ago, so ask me again next year how I like it!). Warehousing and transportation being things I would use solutions other than SAP and connect them to it. If I really need a MRP-function, that is.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

schnevets 7y ago

ServiceNow is another disruptor with an interesting approach similar to SalesForce. SNow started as a Remedy alternative, but really saw IT groups as the infrastructure that every other Department relies on. While SAP hold influence in a company by controlling the purse strings, a good ServiceNow implementation holds the Microservice and Technology information every group is reliant on. I'm not as familiar with SalesForce, but I think it has a similar stake by focusing on CRM. If you start at the customer data, you can influence the profit centers and influence a company that way. I mostly mention these success stories to say that a Goliath like SAP won't be taken down by one David, but by a ton of ankle-biters eating their lunch. Maybe these ankle-biters will be easily replaceable, but I wonder what an organization where Enterprise Software is constantly hot-swapped will look like, given how inefficient Application Retirement projects can be.

whatsmyusername 7y ago
ServiceNow is garbage. They're probably less garbage than working with SAP but they're still garbage.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bigger_cheese 7y ago
  No. The Industrial Plant I work at uses Service Now (For IT and Helpdesk support) and SAP (For Payroll, HR, Purchasing, Maintenance Scheduling etc.). Service Now is much, much worse. IT department is so dysfunctional and Service Now is a big part of that. One of my coworkers refers to it as "Service Eventually"
  - whatsmyusername 7y ago
    I'm amused by the amount of third parties (Sumologic for example) that have ServiceNow plugins. I'm curious what kind of usage metrics they have on the feature. I suspect it's just a feature parity/selling point but not actually used in practice, like EKS and managed SFTP on AWS. Nowhere I've worked that used ServiceNow encouraged solving practical problems with it. A grand total of once I took a crack at something that would have been trivial if Sumologic could alert to ServiceNow. It became hilariously obvious in 3 or 4 back and forth emails with the gatekeepers that their 3 month testing process, 45 emails, and 16 meetings requirement for a one line change was not cost effective. My time was better spent crafting an email forwarding rule that sent the related conversations to the trash and moving on to solvable problems.