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How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? It's been years since I worked with any SAP system. Do big corps still use them or many of them have moved away to m

How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? It's been years since I worked with any SAP system. Do big corps still use them or many of them have moved away to more "modern" systems?

zxienin 6y ago
They’re $30B, with YoY growth in teen double digits. https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2020/sap-factsheet-jan2020-en.pdf https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2020/sap-factshe... Acquisitions gave them some breather.
majewsky 6y ago
(Disclosure: I work at SAP.) > How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? Our marketing likes to throw this phrase around that 80% of all transactions worldwide touch an SAP system at some point. > [Have big corps] moved away to more "modern" systems? What does "more modern" mean to you? Honest question. When people talk ask for "modern" software, most times it's either about being buzzword-compliant (cloud-native FaaS on Kubernetes or whatever) or about throwing away old idiosyncrasies (or both). Obviously the traditional SAP system (i.e. R/3 or more recently S/4 HANA) has a metric ton of idiosyncrasies, much of it stemming from its 40+ years long lineage. But personally, I'm pretty sure that a full-on rewrite with modern tools would accumulate a similar amount of baggage on the way to feature parity. Business processes just are very complex. Just think about the large number of stakeholders involved in each process, along with the legal requirements the processes must fulfil. And by the way, a significant part of the baggage is due to stakeholders wanting to make the system more modern. These days, you don't need the SAP GUI desktop app to access an SAP system. There are web-based UI frameworks in there as well. But of course, the old stuff often has to stay because of compatibility requirements or because no one dares to touch the working part of the system. Windows is another example of such a layered architecture with the new-fangled stuff laying on top of the older components. I'm not saying this to belittle the idea of a more "modern" system. Heck, my team runs an internal cloud solution using OpenStack deployed on Kubernetes, so we're pretty buzzword-compliant already. :) I just think that if you define "modern" as "the project started less than X years ago", that's not a very useful metric for evaluating the merits of such a system.
- dx034 6y ago
  I absolute agree with this sentiment. Software can only be simple if it covers a narrow set of use cases. ERP software for large companies that works across borders and industries will always have to handle a million edge cases and accumulate "weirdness" along the way.

How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? It's been years since I worked with any SAP system. Do big corps still use them or many of them have moved away to more "modern" systems?

zxienin 6y ago

They’re $30B, with YoY growth in teen double digits. https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2020/sap-factsheet-jan2020-en.pdf https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2020/sap-factshe... Acquisitions gave them some breather.

majewsky 6y ago

(Disclosure: I work at SAP.) > How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? Our marketing likes to throw this phrase around that 80% of all transactions worldwide touch an SAP system at some point. > [Have big corps] moved away to more "modern" systems? What does "more modern" mean to you? Honest question. When people talk ask for "modern" software, most times it's either about being buzzword-compliant (cloud-native FaaS on Kubernetes or whatever) or about throwing away old idiosyncrasies (or both). Obviously the traditional SAP system (i.e. R/3 or more recently S/4 HANA) has a metric ton of idiosyncrasies, much of it stemming from its 40+ years long lineage. But personally, I'm pretty sure that a full-on rewrite with modern tools would accumulate a similar amount of baggage on the way to feature parity. Business processes just are very complex. Just think about the large number of stakeholders involved in each process, along with the legal requirements the processes must fulfil. And by the way, a significant part of the baggage is due to stakeholders wanting to make the system more modern. These days, you don't need the SAP GUI desktop app to access an SAP system. There are web-based UI frameworks in there as well. But of course, the old stuff often has to stay because of compatibility requirements or because no one dares to touch the working part of the system. Windows is another example of such a layered architecture with the new-fangled stuff laying on top of the older components. I'm not saying this to belittle the idea of a more "modern" system. Heck, my team runs an internal cloud solution using OpenStack deployed on Kubernetes, so we're pretty buzzword-compliant already. :) I just think that if you define "modern" as "the project started less than X years ago", that's not a very useful metric for evaluating the merits of such a system.

dx034 6y ago
I absolute agree with this sentiment. Software can only be simple if it covers a narrow set of use cases. ERP software for large companies that works across borders and industries will always have to handle a million edge cases and accumulate "weirdness" along the way.