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I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for

by _bxg1 6y ago

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B. And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pacific that had never been in contact with our civilization and had steam-powered airships or some crap. And I'm sure this is just one of many such industries, even just within the umbrella of software.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
  - sq_ 6y ago
    This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
    - shavingspiders 6y ago
      Another view of this - if the true purchase is of a group of workflows, are they purchasing for the things they know they need or the assurance that behemoth IBM/SAP/whatever has a process for whatever they didn't think about? Purchasing to minimise some future operational risk.
      - pc86 6y ago
        This is probably an understated benefit a lot of us in tech don't think about. If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
    - ezconnect 6y ago
      Some industries need your system to be certified for a software system to consume their data/services. You don't have much choice.
    - satvikpendem 6y ago
      Sounds like Agile to me.
    - 6y ago
- ivalm 6y ago
  > At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP. Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind
    - ivalm 6y ago
      I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.
    - realityking 6y ago
      While Microsoft does sell their own SAP competitor they actually use SAP for their main accounting. https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-hq-use-sap-instead-of-microsoft-dynamics-erp/ https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure I've seen job adverts from Google for people with experience of Oracle Hyperion. What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
    - NikolaNovak 6y ago
- brundolf 6y ago
  To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small (<100 people) companies. Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".
  - ohazi 6y ago
    > Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not big fans. Correction: 22 years at SAP, not as CEO.
    - tinco 6y ago
      He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..
      - Aloha 6y ago
        Promoted to the level of his incompetence perhaps.
        ido 6y ago
        Both hp and SAP are absolutely gargantuan companies (try guessing how many employees each had by the end of his tenure- unless you actually know I'll bet you'll underestimate it). They are also old (for computer related companies at least) and have lots of products for lots of clients. Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.
- piokoch 6y ago
  "My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc." Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true: "A 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. And that’s why SAP Configuration Specialist is an actual job title!"
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
    - bregma 6y ago
      Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
      - NikolaNovak 6y ago
        Corrected! Thx :)
      - tripzilch 6y ago
        > an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. good thing we have SAP to facilitate the development of large scale business, such as monopolies and cartels.
        perl4ever 6y ago
        I don't think the existence of SAP is particularly relevant to a monopoly that exists because of statute. Although I don't live in such a state, I know there are places in the US where all the liquor stores are government run.
- Jestar342 6y ago
  I worked for EDS from late 90s to early 00s and SAP was _everywhere_. Projects were scoped and framed as "how can we fit this into SAP?" - and not "how can SAP help this project?" SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP. Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.
  - ebiester 6y ago
    That... explains a bit of the herding cats commercial.
- ehnto 6y ago
  A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation. I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.
    - hckr_news 6y ago
      Agreed. Running a company with a sustainable business model and healthy profits, not being propped up by VC money would probably do the local economy of one such a city perhaps more good.
    - economicslol 6y ago
      But my Blockchain Deep Learning Dog Walking app is going to change the world!! I went to Stanford so I must be right! /s
      - lowdose 6y ago
        Dog walking is not a viable matchmaking platform business model because successful matches cut out the matchmaker, you didn't get the memo?
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I have heard of sap in tons of contexts in undergrad business classes, news articles, and things like that. Though I have never come across an implementation in the wild. Though my experience in large enterprise is limited.
BoysenberryPi 6y ago
I work in B2B software and almost all of our clients use SAP. It's absolutely massive.
dvdhsu 6y ago
Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce (https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/) that was well received on HN too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.com) (As an aside — when we started Retool, we ourselves didn't expect the "custom internal tools" to be such a big market. As it turns out, we now have customers that spend $400M+ / year on building custom, homegrown, internal tools! While we [or any single vendor] certainly can't capture all of it, our goal is to capture some percent of it.)
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  Where is most of your adoption coming from? Which verticals? Which horizontal groups?
- flarg 6y ago
  Did you ever look at pega, nintex and Appian?
- joenot443 6y ago
  Great article David! Thanks for taking the time to include some screenshots and videos. This is the kind of company-funded-blog-content that we all love to see.
- vlucas 6y ago
  I worked at NetSuite for a little over 4.5 years (2 years before the Oracle acquisition), and it also blew my mind how much companies were spending on NetSuite customizations. It's a huge world out there for sure.
maxwin 6y ago
My company is using SAP so it is very familiar to me. But before I joined my company, I have never heard of SAP. There are some good industry process knowledge that gives them an advantage and the software is good once you get used to it. But it can definitely be 10X better (there is a big opportunity to make it easier to customize or integrate with other software) . However, once you become their customer, the switching cost is very high even though there is better software in the market. That makes it difficult for startup to break into this market.
cambalache 6y ago
Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim 0.00001% of their income.
- devin 6y ago
  Good luck! You're time to market and the sunk cost fallacy are overwhelmingly against you.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    You skimmed a small part of SAP’s market? Like, a specific niche that you built a better tool for? I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.
    - abiogenesis 6y ago
      Yes, we competed with SAP in a specific industry and honestly our tools were better and more user friendly, and no, they were not all huge companies, which is one of the reasons we were able to eat SAP's cake because we were much cheaper. I believe we got the job 90% of the time when we were shortlisted with SAP. We lost some customers to SAP later on because they become bigger and "consultants" told them that they should switch to SAP because, you know, all big companies use SAP. I haven't heard of any success stories from those customers yet (this is not entirely SAP's fault though).
jldugger 6y ago
When I was starting school, my dad had informed me that SAP was HUGE, and consultants with SAP skills were pulling in 200k, back when even google employees were still waiting to IPO.
crimsonalucard 6y ago
Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  Because it's your business logic. And your GUI builder. And your tax system. And your legal report generator. Etc.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Yes I've heard that often businesses mould themselves to the software, rather than the other way around. The argument is that decades of exposure means that, if not entirely optimal, it at least represents competent processes for running a very large and complicated business. Rolling your own multinational tax compliance in SQL would be madness.
- cutler 6y ago
  Try getting your average office worker to deal with an SQL database directly. No chance unless it only has a single table. A database without an interface tailored for a specific purpose is useless for office staff. I know this from experience having once tried to get office staff using pgAdmin to update the shiny new database I had designed for them.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    What's funny is that this is what SQL was originally designed for. That's why it reads so much like English. Of course, CLIs were too.
- thelibrarian 6y ago
  Why would you use an ecommerce platform instead of a regular SQL database?
spottybanana 6y ago
You really have to be living in an alternate universe if you haven't heard about SAP. To me it feels like every other job involves some work with it.
rb808 6y ago
The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.
- MandieD 6y ago
  I’m nominally a DevOps engineer at a really big Germany-based auto parts (among other things) manufacturer, specializing in Azure and Kubernetes. My real job many days is helping devs make peace with our various web proxies - even the special, relatively open, non-SSL-intercepting “dev proxy” requires CNTLM, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary on its current build. And of course, my little darlings take dependencies on it for things for which the masses absolutely not have access to it.
- horsie-bacon 6y ago
  as a designer working in enterprise side application development - so much this. So many design portfolios are geared towards consumer side apps but the world is powered by the most dry boring stuff. [I finally got around to making an account after lurking for so long. Your post was the catalyst ]
clairity 6y ago
most people would be similarly surprised that $1T-market-cap microsoft is a business & enterprise software company, rather than a consumer one. it's ~80-90% of their $130B in yearly revenue (hard to get more precise because of the way they report their numbers).
- _bxg1 6y ago
  That's not surprising to me personally, but I can see how it might be to the average person
  - clairity 6y ago
    yes, but a decent chunk of it competes directly against SAP.
chrischen 6y ago
I'd imagine the smart startup engineer folks will never know o this market because they're either working at some place like Google or doing their own thing, and one would need to have worked at a less sophisticated blue chip company to be exposed to these flawed systems.
- eru 6y ago
  Some people also worked in finance. That can pay well, but has plenty of SAP or similar crap to deal with.
fovc 6y ago
Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability. We've slowly stitched together an assortment of SaaS tools, custom built modules, and Excel files in the exact way I swore we would never do. If anyone's been through this hell before, I would appreciate some help.
- LilBytes 6y ago
  Yeah I thought the same, I've worked with, against and for SAP since I turned 21. My whole career has spent working on ERP on various platforms.
- downvoteme1 6y ago
  I have been doing ERP consulting for about a decade now and I tend to disagree. I think we have a lot ph ERP options now in the paid space apart from just Quickbooks and SAP. You need to pick and choose based upon what is the most complex operation for a company- be it multi currency financials, complex supply chain or some other parameter. Then you can pick from lowest complexity to highest in the following manner * Quick books * Sage * Dynamics / NetSuite * JD Edwards / Infor / Manhattan * Workday * Oracle EBS / SAP Each of those on the same line are similar in features and complexity. This is obviously not a complete list - just the ones I have dealt with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  Quickbooks will do you fine up to $100M in revenue or 8-10+ years in operation. When you cross either of those bridges, you should think about implementing a "real" ERP. But this doesn't happen until your team (accounting/finance/CEO/CFO) start running into roadblocks in either piecing together financial statements, or the month close process starts taking weeks of manual labor, or there's a HUGE accounting issue and everyone discovers the forecast is way off and the company has been burning cash faster than expected. At this point you have the organizational momentum to do the crazy amount of work required in getting an ERP up and running, which requires getting most of your business flowing into it so that it'll even be remotely useful (otherwise everyone goes back to Excel). What needs to flow into it? Everything you're doing by hand to update your three sheets. You need to get revenue/income in there (sales orders, purchase orders etc.), product costs if you have them, payroll, bills (internet, office supplies). Hopefully you use something like Bill.com, and this becomes a (slightly) simpler process. Maybe you have vendors in Europe where you pay in Euro, so you now also have to figure out how you're going to convert currencies. Maybe you have warranty on your products, so you have to balance accrual accounts. This list goes on, and on, and on. Every company is different, and you might not even recognize the overlap between two ERP launches besides the fact that they're using SAP.
m463 6y ago
A friend of mine worked for Sun in the late 90's and mentioned SAP to me. He told me companies would buy top-of-the-line (overpriced) hardware and pay a premium to get SAP up and running, because they would plug their company into it and recoup their costs almost overnight. It would just do say currency conversions or other super-boring non-core-business things better and save a pile of cash. You can't save yourself rich, but sometimes the difference between a profitable quarter and a horrendous loss might be your accounting software or your tax software...
jogundas 6y ago
It seems that the market is big enough to allow unicorns making "plugins" like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation to emerge.
deng 6y ago
I'm in Germany and of course everyone here has at least heard of SAP and knows it's huge, but I guess not many people know just how huge. SAP consultancy is a big market here with lots and lots of job openings. I knew a few people who did that, it's usually a very well paid job, but it's well paid because otherwise no one in his right mind would do it. From what I heard, it's incredibly boring while at the same time incredibly stressful when you're on-site. Also, I've never met anyone who actually liked SAP.
- badpun 6y ago
  I've heard very similar things about being a SAP consultant here in Europe - basically, it sounds like a job for someone who: - understands technology, but is not a big fan of it - can communicate with clients - can handle stress well - is into salary maximization
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Doesn't mind living out of a suitcase.
  - eden_hazard 6y ago
    A friend was telling me how they make over $200 an hour. For a job that doesn't require a technical chops of a fullstack dev, that sounds crazy to me but doable.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  SAP consulting is like some sort of mythical club,where only the chosen ones can join. SAP isn't something one can learn from his bedroom and then go around advising multinationals.You have to somehow get trained on a job where it is used. So the vast majority of SAP consultants pretty much owe to the fact that they lucked into it.It is however, pretty lucrative though.
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  I liked SAP, especially compared to what I have used since. We have never met, so your point is still true! It might be some time before Germany lets us English types in again!
KMag 6y ago
My sister-in-law graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering, and got exposed-to/proficient-in SAP at one of her first jobs. Now, she does SAP consulting work, much of it from home (even before COVID-19), at a significant pay bump and highly flexible hours.
deleted 6y ago
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ck_one 6y ago
SAP is a German company so here everybody knows about it. There is even a startup strategy called "unbundling SAP" where you pick one feature of SAP, do it 10x better and target a smaller but still huge market. Examples for such companies are: Personio (500M valuation), Cellonis (2.5B valuation)
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Sounds similar to the "unbundling Zapier" article that made its rounds here on HN a couple days ago. Definitely seems viable.
  - seunoyebode 6y ago
    mind sharing a link of this article, can't seem to find it
    - lain_ 6y ago
      https://kamerontanseli.ghost.io/first-it-was-craiglist-next-its-zapier/ https://kamerontanseli.ghost.io/first-it-was-craiglist-next-... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126455 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126455
twelve40 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, very interesting to read. > 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 Wow, this is nuts. 20,000 database tables?
- ci5er 6y ago
  They've been adding tables since 1980...
hbarka 6y ago
Believe it or not, there was business software in the 90s. They were called *RP. ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning, MRP = Material Resource Planning, CRM = Customer Relationship Management. Home-grown code hacks to run a business cannot do what these companies can do, that’s why they’re expensive.
andrewstuart 6y ago
SAP is amongst the least fun software category which is ERP systems. Highly customised, to the point that upgrades are impossible. Extremely complex systems. So complex that vendor lock in is assured, and the lock in means big prices. And yet a good business because ERP systems are at the core of any medium to big business. It's grindy, boring, challenging without being fun work, often using non standard technologies that have been developed by the ERP systems vendor, which help ensure lock in. ERP companies like SAP and Oracle are the absolute best at making money on services - they know how to charge huge huge amounts and get away with it. There's TONS of money there. I wouldn't want to work in that area though.
HenryBemis 6y ago
> ..78% of the world’s food all flow through SAP? Having worked in food industry as IT about 20y ago, we used to have fragmented system portfolio, and were struggling to pull data from one system to another. The around 2002 management decided to switch to SAP. I remember working on the storage/capacity/CPU aspect of it (and mid-migration I left the company and completely missed on the SAP train in my career). That food company was providing milk, yogurt, cheese, juice, ice-cream to about 25mil people (customer base). That's SAP for you right there. So that 78% doesn't surprise me at all. I believe the remaining 23% is too small to invest that amount of $$$ nad just hasn't done it yet. When you get the ability to "track every cucumber" from pick to sell, cut down on fraud, errors, be able to calculate every bit of profit, loss, why would you go anywhere else? I understand the initial cost may be hefty, but once you set it up (good and well), you can stop focusing on that, and see how to grow the business parts of your business, and not the admin.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  See this sounds good, and is why many execs are sold on it. But because it is so massive, it's impossible to find talent that can actually implement it properly. That's IF your company doesn't require a ridiculous amount of customization. Projects always run over-budget and over-time. Vendor lock-in becomes a huge problem. These companies solely exist to keep customers using their software and paying their service fees. They then provide just enough marketing buzzwords to justify it to execs who justify it to other execs. If SAP is done right, it is very powerful, but it is seldom done right.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
In my opinion the civilization in question does not have steam-powered airships unfortunately, but it does have some really overpriced crap.
ci5er 6y ago
I've got a - maybe silly - question: Do you think that software engineers read about the business of technology? I mean, some of these behemoths (or used-to-be behemoths) of technology, like Oracle and Intel and Microsoft (Ok - everyone knows them) and Dell and Apple (mostly the 2nd one) and places like SAP (which is arguably the biggest database and logistics and supply chain (sans the EDI middle-ware vendors on the planet) and Synnix (which is arguably the largest ODM supplier of white label servers to the largest data centers in the world), and, well, Wistron? BBG? (Submarine - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/) Satellites? Aerospace? What it takes to wire our world together? This is not a criticism - it is simply curiousity - as a tech person - you don't read up on (or do you think people do or do not read up on?) the way the world works technologically? My son graduated with an engineering degree recently and his friends always want me to take them to lunch (free food!), but also so I can tell them how the world is connected (power, telecom, SDN, Satellites (launch - cradle-to-grave), and I'm always a little amazed because I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured? I guess I don't understand. If you have a moment, could you edumacate me?
- solarkraft 6y ago
  I do read about these things, but I can also spend my time with lots of other stimulating/important stuff. Priorities, maybe?
  - ci5er 6y ago
    Fair enough - I was just curious if the average modern software developer read books by Andy Grove ("Paranoid"), or Crossing the Chasm, or the biography of Steve Jobs, or kept track of what's up with the top 250 global tech companies on planet Earth every week for 20 years. Now, that's a little unfair because I read really fast. But - I guess I was just curious about how a tech person couldn't know about SAP. NOT as a criticism, btw -- just I don't know how this could be? They are not a secret company. I just (apparently) don't know how young software engineers are wired? (Yeah yeah - Ok boomer, I get it) But, because people actually do matter to me - I would like to understand better how they are wired... EDIT: I am also stimulated by my healthcare projects and my energy projects and my stupid stupid project to build a carbon-nanotube elevator to the sky (which may have more funding than practical deliverables!), but I am completely stimulated. I assumed you were too, so it wasn't intended to be an either/or. EDIT2: If you don't know the answer to the question I was asking, don't worry about it. Nobody else appears to know either. Just because I have a question doesn't mean that there is an answer. Thank you for engaging and have a good night.
mister_hn 6y ago
SAP was just nominated (together with Deutsche Telekom) the contractor for the official German Vivid tracking app (Covid-warn-App), just saying
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  I really don't get why they did not award an agency with a proven track record of delivering apps. If you choose one of the big ones, you still have high rates, but at least there is a chance of actually getting it done. SAP is known for incredibly long ongoing projects and Deutsche Telekom has a track record of destroying acquired online businesses. I would bet 10:1, that this project will fail.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    Probably because SAP is a huge political force in Germany more than anything.
harsh3195 6y ago
I haven’t read of such things in my country but am hopeful that this will happen soon here in India.
economicslol 6y ago
It's like Salesforce, that crap is ubiquitous in large companies. Have you ever used it? It's a nightmarishly clunky piece of trash and yet Salesforce is a 150B behemoth.
jmilloy 6y ago
I clicked on the link not having heard of ERP or SAP and expecting to have my mind blown, too. But, isn't that software almost the reason why computers and databases and programming happened? To help businesses with there boring business stuff, like inventory and orders and accounting?
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on. And those don't use $LATEST_TECH, $FANCY_FRAMEWORK or $EXOTIC_LANGUAGE. They use $BORING_TECH, $OLD_LANGUAGE, $DEPRECATED_FRAMEWORK. They are not in the cloud, don't update often, have to deal with legacy stacks, stacked on a stack of legacy stacks, and administrative burden from left to right. Those are the ones that pay for an Oracle licence, and sync it to dozens of excel sheets from an FTP and a lone Access DB, where all auth is manage by a Tomcat service actually proxying to Active Directory and their custom CRM. And they certainly don't have a team of 10x programmers. In fact, most are windows dev that never used the terminals and don't have admin rights on their machine. I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team. They are everywhere. They make billions.
wdb 6y ago
TfL, BP, Shell etc run on SAP. Had good fun messing around with SAP over there
- ciceryadam 6y ago
  ExxonMobil runs on it as well.
TheArcane 6y ago
> Oracle and SAP are so dominant that even Microsoft uses SAP instead of their own ERP offering, Microsoft Dynamics. This is insane. If it's hard for a company like Microsoft to move away from SAP and shift to their own solution (hence saving face in addition to the $$$), I can't imagine anyone switches software in the ERP world
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  Not so mad, MS Dynamics GP and Nav don't play in the same league as SAP/Oracle. AX is closer, but not there.
kradroy 6y ago
I work for SAP and it's surprising to me that not even other engineers in the Bay Area have heard of the company despite its campus in Palo Alto and their sponsorship of the "SAP Center" in San Jose. Do you file expenses? You probably use SAP Concur. Do you order office materials or equipment? You may use SAP Ariba. Have you taken part in interviewing a candidate coworker, or have you done yearly career goal planning? You may have used SuccessFactors for that. And this doesn't even count SAP proper's offerings (HANA/S4, etc).
- ciceryadam 6y ago
  Concur, Ariba and SuccessFactors are acquisitions, and only SuccessFactors is fully integrated under the SAP Umbrella. Here in Prague Concur and Ariba have their standalone subsidiary companies, with Separate HQs in different parts of town.
eru 6y ago
I did an internship at the SAP HQ in Germany more than a decade back. The work was exceedingly boring. But they had excellent lunch. Better than most Google offices.
adius 6y ago
This is kind of how I felt when I started to learn Haskell
otabdeveloper4 6y ago
You work in IT and you've never heard of SAP? That's pretty wild, like not knowing who Microsoft or IBM are.

by _bxg1 6y ago

NikolaNovak 6y ago

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
- sq_ 6y ago
  This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because it's what they really need, or are they buying it because everyone else uses it?
  - shavingspiders 6y ago
    Another view of this - if the true purchase is of a group of workflows, are they purchasing for the things they know they need or the assurance that behemoth IBM/SAP/whatever has a process for whatever they didn't think about? Purchasing to minimise some future operational risk.
    - pc86 6y ago
      This is probably an understated benefit a lot of us in tech don't think about. If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.
  - ezconnect 6y ago
    Some industries need your system to be certified for a software system to consume their data/services. You don't have much choice.
  - satvikpendem 6y ago
    Sounds like Agile to me.
  - 6y ago
ivalm 6y ago
> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP. Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind
  - ivalm 6y ago
    I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.
  - realityking 6y ago
    While Microsoft does sell their own SAP competitor they actually use SAP for their main accounting. https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-hq-use-sap-instead-of-microsoft-dynamics-erp/ https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure I've seen job adverts from Google for people with experience of Oracle Hyperion. What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
To add some context (for your curiosity), I'm not in The Valley and I'd never worked at a true "startup" until very recently, but I have only ever worked at small (<100 people) companies. Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. I had actually heard the name SAP come up in passing at my last company, who had lots of ginormous clients. But all I'd really gathered before reading the article was "it's some kind of database, or something".
- ohazi 6y ago
  > Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're not big fans. Correction: 22 years at SAP, not as CEO.
  - tinco 6y ago
    He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..
    - Aloha 6y ago
      Promoted to the level of his incompetence perhaps.
      - ido 6y ago
        Both hp and SAP are absolutely gargantuan companies (try guessing how many employees each had by the end of his tenure- unless you actually know I'll bet you'll underestimate it). They are also old (for computer related companies at least) and have lots of products for lots of clients. Not to say he wasn't bad at it (I honestly don't know) but it's a hard job to get right.
piokoch 6y ago
"My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc." Is SAP something that can be somehow scaled down? if this is used for a beer store, it has to be really large store, if that's what is written in the cited article is true: "A 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. And that’s why SAP Configuration Specialist is an actual job title!"
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  Ah,I guess context would help - "The Beer Store" is Ontario's [Corrected From "Canada"] monopoly province-wide beer retail chain. You are absolutely right, a single retail store would not use such an ERP :)
  - bregma 6y ago
    Er, an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. Let me guess, you live in Toronto?
    - NikolaNovak 6y ago
      Corrected! Thx :)
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      > an Ontario-wide beer retail chain, owned by the province-wide beer wholesale monopoly, in turn owned by a cartel of foreign breweries. good thing we have SAP to facilitate the development of large scale business, such as monopolies and cartels.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        I don't think the existence of SAP is particularly relevant to a monopoly that exists because of statute. Although I don't live in such a state, I know there are places in the US where all the liquor stores are government run.
Jestar342 6y ago
I worked for EDS from late 90s to early 00s and SAP was _everywhere_. Projects were scoped and framed as "how can we fit this into SAP?" - and not "how can SAP help this project?" SAP is/was virulent in nature. If you used it for one thing it damn near forced you to use it for everything. A significant chunk of the work EDS were undertaking (as IT outsource) was migrating to SAP. Our timesheets, project plans, data, hell even a huge chunk of our app development was done in SAP. We were paying through the nose for SAP contractors too.
- ebiester 6y ago
  That... explains a bit of the herding cats commercial.
ehnto 6y ago
A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for the local banks. In fact all of the companies I've worked for here have been making software for local industries! From solar installers, energy efficient lighting manufacturers, local commerce and POS systems, mechanics software, creative market places, local lead generation. I think if you want to start a business from scratch and you're not in SV, it's worth targeting those problems instead of problems that SV/startups have. You might not get sexy VC capital, but you might be able to jumpstart with some clients up front.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    Agreed. Running a company with a sustainable business model and healthy profits, not being propped up by VC money would probably do the local economy of one such a city perhaps more good.
  - economicslol 6y ago
    But my Blockchain Deep Learning Dog Walking app is going to change the world!! I went to Stanford so I must be right! /s
    - lowdose 6y ago
      Dog walking is not a viable matchmaking platform business model because successful matches cut out the matchmaker, you didn't get the memo?
jjeaff 6y ago
I have heard of sap in tons of contexts in undergrad business classes, news articles, and things like that. Though I have never come across an implementation in the wild. Though my experience in large enterprise is limited.

BoysenberryPi 6y ago

I work in B2B software and almost all of our clients use SAP. It's absolutely massive.

dvdhsu 6y ago

Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce (https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/) that was well received on HN too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.com) (As an aside — when we started Retool, we ourselves didn't expect the "custom internal tools" to be such a big market. As it turns out, we now have customers that spend $400M+ / year on building custom, homegrown, internal tools! While we [or any single vendor] certainly can't capture all of it, our goal is to capture some percent of it.)

1cvmask 6y ago
Where is most of your adoption coming from? Which verticals? Which horizontal groups?
flarg 6y ago
Did you ever look at pega, nintex and Appian?
joenot443 6y ago
Great article David! Thanks for taking the time to include some screenshots and videos. This is the kind of company-funded-blog-content that we all love to see.
vlucas 6y ago
I worked at NetSuite for a little over 4.5 years (2 years before the Oracle acquisition), and it also blew my mind how much companies were spending on NetSuite customizations. It's a huge world out there for sure.

maxwin 6y ago

My company is using SAP so it is very familiar to me. But before I joined my company, I have never heard of SAP. There are some good industry process knowledge that gives them an advantage and the software is good once you get used to it. But it can definitely be 10X better (there is a big opportunity to make it easier to customize or integrate with other software) . However, once you become their customer, the switching cost is very high even though there is better software in the market. That makes it difficult for startup to break into this market.

cambalache 6y ago

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim 0.00001% of their income.

devin 6y ago
Good luck! You're time to market and the sunk cost fallacy are overwhelmingly against you.
abiogenesis 6y ago
I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  You skimmed a small part of SAP’s market? Like, a specific niche that you built a better tool for? I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    Yes, we competed with SAP in a specific industry and honestly our tools were better and more user friendly, and no, they were not all huge companies, which is one of the reasons we were able to eat SAP's cake because we were much cheaper. I believe we got the job 90% of the time when we were shortlisted with SAP. We lost some customers to SAP later on because they become bigger and "consultants" told them that they should switch to SAP because, you know, all big companies use SAP. I haven't heard of any success stories from those customers yet (this is not entirely SAP's fault though).

jldugger 6y ago

When I was starting school, my dad had informed me that SAP was HUGE, and consultants with SAP skills were pulling in 200k, back when even google employees were still waiting to IPO.

crimsonalucard 6y ago

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

_bxg1 6y ago
Because it's your business logic. And your GUI builder. And your tax system. And your legal report generator. Etc.
- hnick 6y ago
  Yes I've heard that often businesses mould themselves to the software, rather than the other way around. The argument is that decades of exposure means that, if not entirely optimal, it at least represents competent processes for running a very large and complicated business. Rolling your own multinational tax compliance in SQL would be madness.
cutler 6y ago
Try getting your average office worker to deal with an SQL database directly. No chance unless it only has a single table. A database without an interface tailored for a specific purpose is useless for office staff. I know this from experience having once tried to get office staff using pgAdmin to update the shiny new database I had designed for them.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  What's funny is that this is what SQL was originally designed for. That's why it reads so much like English. Of course, CLIs were too.
thelibrarian 6y ago
Why would you use an ecommerce platform instead of a regular SQL database?

spottybanana 6y ago

You really have to be living in an alternate universe if you haven't heard about SAP. To me it feels like every other job involves some work with it.

rb808 6y ago

The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.

MandieD 6y ago
I’m nominally a DevOps engineer at a really big Germany-based auto parts (among other things) manufacturer, specializing in Azure and Kubernetes. My real job many days is helping devs make peace with our various web proxies - even the special, relatively open, non-SSL-intercepting “dev proxy” requires CNTLM, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary on its current build. And of course, my little darlings take dependencies on it for things for which the masses absolutely not have access to it.
horsie-bacon 6y ago
as a designer working in enterprise side application development - so much this. So many design portfolios are geared towards consumer side apps but the world is powered by the most dry boring stuff. [I finally got around to making an account after lurking for so long. Your post was the catalyst ]

clairity 6y ago

most people would be similarly surprised that $1T-market-cap microsoft is a business & enterprise software company, rather than a consumer one. it's ~80-90% of their $130B in yearly revenue (hard to get more precise because of the way they report their numbers).

_bxg1 6y ago
That's not surprising to me personally, but I can see how it might be to the average person
- clairity 6y ago
  yes, but a decent chunk of it competes directly against SAP.

chrischen 6y ago

I'd imagine the smart startup engineer folks will never know o this market because they're either working at some place like Google or doing their own thing, and one would need to have worked at a less sophisticated blue chip company to be exposed to these flawed systems.

eru 6y ago
Some people also worked in finance. That can pay well, but has plenty of SAP or similar crap to deal with.

fovc 6y ago

Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability. We've slowly stitched together an assortment of SaaS tools, custom built modules, and Excel files in the exact way I swore we would never do. If anyone's been through this hell before, I would appreciate some help.

LilBytes 6y ago
Yeah I thought the same, I've worked with, against and for SAP since I turned 21. My whole career has spent working on ERP on various platforms.
downvoteme1 6y ago
I have been doing ERP consulting for about a decade now and I tend to disagree. I think we have a lot ph ERP options now in the paid space apart from just Quickbooks and SAP. You need to pick and choose based upon what is the most complex operation for a company- be it multi currency financials, complex supply chain or some other parameter. Then you can pick from lowest complexity to highest in the following manner * Quick books * Sage * Dynamics / NetSuite * JD Edwards / Infor / Manhattan * Workday * Oracle EBS / SAP Each of those on the same line are similar in features and complexity. This is obviously not a complete list - just the ones I have dealt with.
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tomnipotent 6y ago
Quickbooks will do you fine up to $100M in revenue or 8-10+ years in operation. When you cross either of those bridges, you should think about implementing a "real" ERP. But this doesn't happen until your team (accounting/finance/CEO/CFO) start running into roadblocks in either piecing together financial statements, or the month close process starts taking weeks of manual labor, or there's a HUGE accounting issue and everyone discovers the forecast is way off and the company has been burning cash faster than expected. At this point you have the organizational momentum to do the crazy amount of work required in getting an ERP up and running, which requires getting most of your business flowing into it so that it'll even be remotely useful (otherwise everyone goes back to Excel). What needs to flow into it? Everything you're doing by hand to update your three sheets. You need to get revenue/income in there (sales orders, purchase orders etc.), product costs if you have them, payroll, bills (internet, office supplies). Hopefully you use something like Bill.com, and this becomes a (slightly) simpler process. Maybe you have vendors in Europe where you pay in Euro, so you now also have to figure out how you're going to convert currencies. Maybe you have warranty on your products, so you have to balance accrual accounts. This list goes on, and on, and on. Every company is different, and you might not even recognize the overlap between two ERP launches besides the fact that they're using SAP.

m463 6y ago

A friend of mine worked for Sun in the late 90's and mentioned SAP to me. He told me companies would buy top-of-the-line (overpriced) hardware and pay a premium to get SAP up and running, because they would plug their company into it and recoup their costs almost overnight. It would just do say currency conversions or other super-boring non-core-business things better and save a pile of cash. You can't save yourself rich, but sometimes the difference between a profitable quarter and a horrendous loss might be your accounting software or your tax software...

jogundas 6y ago

It seems that the market is big enough to allow unicorns making "plugins" like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation to emerge.

deng 6y ago

I'm in Germany and of course everyone here has at least heard of SAP and knows it's huge, but I guess not many people know just how huge. SAP consultancy is a big market here with lots and lots of job openings. I knew a few people who did that, it's usually a very well paid job, but it's well paid because otherwise no one in his right mind would do it. From what I heard, it's incredibly boring while at the same time incredibly stressful when you're on-site. Also, I've never met anyone who actually liked SAP.

badpun 6y ago
I've heard very similar things about being a SAP consultant here in Europe - basically, it sounds like a job for someone who: - understands technology, but is not a big fan of it - can communicate with clients - can handle stress well - is into salary maximization
- arethuza 6y ago
  Doesn't mind living out of a suitcase.
- eden_hazard 6y ago
  A friend was telling me how they make over $200 an hour. For a job that doesn't require a technical chops of a fullstack dev, that sounds crazy to me but doable.
cosmodisk 6y ago
SAP consulting is like some sort of mythical club,where only the chosen ones can join. SAP isn't something one can learn from his bedroom and then go around advising multinationals.You have to somehow get trained on a job where it is used. So the vast majority of SAP consultants pretty much owe to the fact that they lucked into it.It is however, pretty lucrative though.
jimnotgym 6y ago
I liked SAP, especially compared to what I have used since. We have never met, so your point is still true! It might be some time before Germany lets us English types in again!

KMag 6y ago

My sister-in-law graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering, and got exposed-to/proficient-in SAP at one of her first jobs. Now, she does SAP consulting work, much of it from home (even before COVID-19), at a significant pay bump and highly flexible hours.

deleted 6y ago

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ck_one 6y ago

SAP is a German company so here everybody knows about it. There is even a startup strategy called "unbundling SAP" where you pick one feature of SAP, do it 10x better and target a smaller but still huge market. Examples for such companies are: Personio (500M valuation), Cellonis (2.5B valuation)

yellowapple 6y ago
Sounds similar to the "unbundling Zapier" article that made its rounds here on HN a couple days ago. Definitely seems viable.
- seunoyebode 6y ago
  mind sharing a link of this article, can't seem to find it
  - lain_ 6y ago
    https://kamerontanseli.ghost.io/first-it-was-craiglist-next-its-zapier/ https://kamerontanseli.ghost.io/first-it-was-craiglist-next-... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126455 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126455

twelve40 6y ago

Thanks for sharing, very interesting to read. > 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 Wow, this is nuts. 20,000 database tables?

ci5er 6y ago
They've been adding tables since 1980...

hbarka 6y ago

Believe it or not, there was business software in the 90s. They were called *RP. ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning, MRP = Material Resource Planning, CRM = Customer Relationship Management. Home-grown code hacks to run a business cannot do what these companies can do, that’s why they’re expensive.

andrewstuart 6y ago

SAP is amongst the least fun software category which is ERP systems. Highly customised, to the point that upgrades are impossible. Extremely complex systems. So complex that vendor lock in is assured, and the lock in means big prices. And yet a good business because ERP systems are at the core of any medium to big business. It's grindy, boring, challenging without being fun work, often using non standard technologies that have been developed by the ERP systems vendor, which help ensure lock in. ERP companies like SAP and Oracle are the absolute best at making money on services - they know how to charge huge huge amounts and get away with it. There's TONS of money there. I wouldn't want to work in that area though.

HenryBemis 6y ago

> ..78% of the world’s food all flow through SAP? Having worked in food industry as IT about 20y ago, we used to have fragmented system portfolio, and were struggling to pull data from one system to another. The around 2002 management decided to switch to SAP. I remember working on the storage/capacity/CPU aspect of it (and mid-migration I left the company and completely missed on the SAP train in my career). That food company was providing milk, yogurt, cheese, juice, ice-cream to about 25mil people (customer base). That's SAP for you right there. So that 78% doesn't surprise me at all. I believe the remaining 23% is too small to invest that amount of $$$ nad just hasn't done it yet. When you get the ability to "track every cucumber" from pick to sell, cut down on fraud, errors, be able to calculate every bit of profit, loss, why would you go anywhere else? I understand the initial cost may be hefty, but once you set it up (good and well), you can stop focusing on that, and see how to grow the business parts of your business, and not the admin.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
See this sounds good, and is why many execs are sold on it. But because it is so massive, it's impossible to find talent that can actually implement it properly. That's IF your company doesn't require a ridiculous amount of customization. Projects always run over-budget and over-time. Vendor lock-in becomes a huge problem. These companies solely exist to keep customers using their software and paying their service fees. They then provide just enough marketing buzzwords to justify it to execs who justify it to other execs. If SAP is done right, it is very powerful, but it is seldom done right.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

In my opinion the civilization in question does not have steam-powered airships unfortunately, but it does have some really overpriced crap.

ci5er 6y ago

I've got a - maybe silly - question: Do you think that software engineers read about the business of technology? I mean, some of these behemoths (or used-to-be behemoths) of technology, like Oracle and Intel and Microsoft (Ok - everyone knows them) and Dell and Apple (mostly the 2nd one) and places like SAP (which is arguably the biggest database and logistics and supply chain (sans the EDI middle-ware vendors on the planet) and Synnix (which is arguably the largest ODM supplier of white label servers to the largest data centers in the world), and, well, Wistron? BBG? (Submarine - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/) Satellites? Aerospace? What it takes to wire our world together? This is not a criticism - it is simply curiousity - as a tech person - you don't read up on (or do you think people do or do not read up on?) the way the world works technologically? My son graduated with an engineering degree recently and his friends always want me to take them to lunch (free food!), but also so I can tell them how the world is connected (power, telecom, SDN, Satellites (launch - cradle-to-grave), and I'm always a little amazed because I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured? I guess I don't understand. If you have a moment, could you edumacate me?

solarkraft 6y ago
I do read about these things, but I can also spend my time with lots of other stimulating/important stuff. Priorities, maybe?
- ci5er 6y ago
  Fair enough - I was just curious if the average modern software developer read books by Andy Grove ("Paranoid"), or Crossing the Chasm, or the biography of Steve Jobs, or kept track of what's up with the top 250 global tech companies on planet Earth every week for 20 years. Now, that's a little unfair because I read really fast. But - I guess I was just curious about how a tech person couldn't know about SAP. NOT as a criticism, btw -- just I don't know how this could be? They are not a secret company. I just (apparently) don't know how young software engineers are wired? (Yeah yeah - Ok boomer, I get it) But, because people actually do matter to me - I would like to understand better how they are wired... EDIT: I am also stimulated by my healthcare projects and my energy projects and my stupid stupid project to build a carbon-nanotube elevator to the sky (which may have more funding than practical deliverables!), but I am completely stimulated. I assumed you were too, so it wasn't intended to be an either/or. EDIT2: If you don't know the answer to the question I was asking, don't worry about it. Nobody else appears to know either. Just because I have a question doesn't mean that there is an answer. Thank you for engaging and have a good night.

mister_hn 6y ago

SAP was just nominated (together with Deutsche Telekom) the contractor for the official German Vivid tracking app (Covid-warn-App), just saying

allendoerfer 6y ago
I really don't get why they did not award an agency with a proven track record of delivering apps. If you choose one of the big ones, you still have high rates, but at least there is a chance of actually getting it done. SAP is known for incredibly long ongoing projects and Deutsche Telekom has a track record of destroying acquired online businesses. I would bet 10:1, that this project will fail.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Probably because SAP is a huge political force in Germany more than anything.

harsh3195 6y ago

I haven’t read of such things in my country but am hopeful that this will happen soon here in India.

economicslol 6y ago

It's like Salesforce, that crap is ubiquitous in large companies. Have you ever used it? It's a nightmarishly clunky piece of trash and yet Salesforce is a 150B behemoth.

jmilloy 6y ago

I clicked on the link not having heard of ERP or SAP and expecting to have my mind blown, too. But, isn't that software almost the reason why computers and databases and programming happened? To help businesses with there boring business stuff, like inventory and orders and accounting?

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on. And those don't use $LATEST_TECH, $FANCY_FRAMEWORK or $EXOTIC_LANGUAGE. They use $BORING_TECH, $OLD_LANGUAGE, $DEPRECATED_FRAMEWORK. They are not in the cloud, don't update often, have to deal with legacy stacks, stacked on a stack of legacy stacks, and administrative burden from left to right. Those are the ones that pay for an Oracle licence, and sync it to dozens of excel sheets from an FTP and a lone Access DB, where all auth is manage by a Tomcat service actually proxying to Active Directory and their custom CRM. And they certainly don't have a team of 10x programmers. In fact, most are windows dev that never used the terminals and don't have admin rights on their machine. I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team. They are everywhere. They make billions.

wdb 6y ago

TfL, BP, Shell etc run on SAP. Had good fun messing around with SAP over there

ciceryadam 6y ago
ExxonMobil runs on it as well.

TheArcane 6y ago

> Oracle and SAP are so dominant that even Microsoft uses SAP instead of their own ERP offering, Microsoft Dynamics. This is insane. If it's hard for a company like Microsoft to move away from SAP and shift to their own solution (hence saving face in addition to the $$$), I can't imagine anyone switches software in the ERP world

jimnotgym 6y ago
Not so mad, MS Dynamics GP and Nav don't play in the same league as SAP/Oracle. AX is closer, but not there.

kradroy 6y ago

I work for SAP and it's surprising to me that not even other engineers in the Bay Area have heard of the company despite its campus in Palo Alto and their sponsorship of the "SAP Center" in San Jose. Do you file expenses? You probably use SAP Concur. Do you order office materials or equipment? You may use SAP Ariba. Have you taken part in interviewing a candidate coworker, or have you done yearly career goal planning? You may have used SuccessFactors for that. And this doesn't even count SAP proper's offerings (HANA/S4, etc).

ciceryadam 6y ago
Concur, Ariba and SuccessFactors are acquisitions, and only SuccessFactors is fully integrated under the SAP Umbrella. Here in Prague Concur and Ariba have their standalone subsidiary companies, with Separate HQs in different parts of town.

eru 6y ago

I did an internship at the SAP HQ in Germany more than a decade back. The work was exceedingly boring. But they had excellent lunch. Better than most Google offices.

adius 6y ago

This is kind of how I felt when I started to learn Haskell

otabdeveloper4 6y ago

You work in IT and you've never heard of SAP? That's pretty wild, like not knowing who Microsoft or IBM are.