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Why TechCrunch is boring, SAP is not, and the world has gone mad

224 points by zalthor 15y ago

Jd 15y ago
If any SAP consultants are out there reading this, can you give me some insights on how to get up to speed with the SAP products and ecosystem? I'm a developer/consultant (primarily Salesforce) but am interested in exploring SAP product offerings. Infos in profile. I think there are probably many of us that are interested in this side of the "enterprise" but SAP is sort of its own universe and difficult to understand/penetrate from the outside.
- kokey 15y ago
  I think interesting documentation in this regard would be nice. I believe there's a lot of space for developers to support small companies that aren't big enough to buy into SAP yet, but would benefit from other products and tools that can give them the same functionally. More importantly, have the benefit of their business processes being SAP friendly, but also allow other products to offer some of the same functionality for cheaper. My hope is that some of these products could grow to become a competitor to SAP.
- zalthor 15y ago
  The problem is that most of the legal documentation available are really boring power point presentations that provide as little technical information as possible. Most of their detailed documentation is only available for people who take up their courses (yes, they are that evil) and certification exams. I do remember quite a bit of it was available on rapidshare though unless you were already working on something specific you wouldn't know what exactly to search for. To start with, I would suggesting getting a book on SAP R/3. More specifically the SAP R/3 handbook by Jose Antonio Hernandez. I don't know of any thing available for free (legally) that is as good a place to start. As for the product offerings from SAP, they more or less seem to be components that sit on the same application stack. So getting into one of these applications could provide insight into what everything else does. Disclaimer: I work as an SAP Basis consultant (that's sort of an application admin + OS admin + DBA)
  - Jd 15y ago
    Thanks, added to my Amazon wishlist! I'm planning to pull aside some SAP consultants at some point soon and get them to show me the inner workings of the SAP stack. It is amazing to me that they only provide documentation to people who take their courses.
- dhoe 15y ago
  SAP is one of my focus areas at work. My answer would be to install the trial version (which I think is no longer called miniSAP, but used to be), try to get the general hang of how it's supposed to work, and then dig deeper in the areas that interest you, maybe Java or ABAP development if you want to do development. Last time I've used it, the trial version had a 90 days license, but you could renew it easily and legally. You won't get a SAP job that way, but it might give you enough of an edge to take on SAP-related projects (think "sure, I've done webservice calls into Salesforce and I know how that works with SAP XI, happy to work on your integration project").
- tg3 15y ago
  help.sap.com Or take a really expensive class from SAP (usually paid for by your employer). The truth is that (it seems as though) SAP doesn't want people to be familiar with the system. Their distribution channel is consultants, and consultants make more money if the system is opaque and hard to get up to speed on. This will be the downfall of SAP as we know it IMO (and Oracle, and every other enterprise application that relies on a technical consultant's input), the deliberate opacity of the system for the sake of the distribution channel.
  - pauljonas 15y ago
    ^^ This. ^^ Proprietary lock-in (or dial up the "exclusivity" meter on knowledge and any budding subject matter experts). Enroll some of the customer personnel in expensive training only available from SAP (or SAP "approved" vendors). Contrast to open source models where anybody can become fluent with the code or platform and can be hired or contracted to work at a fraction of the rate a SAP (or to be fair, any proprietary, lock-in "turnkey" "solution"). While I departed the corporate IT world a few years, I have seen the same shenanigans with the likes of Oracle, SAP and others too remote to be recognized by many here. In fact, I owned a company that profited as a "service partner" for a data communications legacy "commerce" software suite maker.
zedonious_sq 15y ago
Author's primary income comes via SAP products
- johnappleby 15y ago
  For sure, and I'm open and honest about that :) I would like to say a few things though, especially to those people who think that it's an us and them scenario. First, I have personally spent a lot of time on open source software, and you will for example find some of my code in the Linux Kernel, if someone hasn't removed it by now. Second, I think that closed communities are a bad thing, and it's something I strongly believe that SAP needs to get better at. Yes, SAP has the largest community network in the world with 3 million members. But it's not good enough at opening that up to the wider tech community, which is a loss. Third, I think that integration to the wider tech community like HN, would be a huge benefit to Enterprise IT. We can be silo'd and the expertise of this group in writing nice-to-use apps is something we really need.
kokey 15y ago
I think the same can be said for 'boring' non-tech industries, like energy, transport, finance, food retail etc. These are essential industries that make the world turn, but because they lack the 'cool' factor they also get the blame for many of the ills in the world. This is while the entertainment industry (film, games, art, music) can shrink by 90% without causing much damage, are often considered less evil or even more important than those who provide the essentials. I don't think the world has gone mad, I just think it's how the world is perceived from by different age groups. When you are a teenager you think you'll never stop listening to the cool new music when you are older, but when you are older you realise the latest craze is cute but not that relevant. On a different tangent, every year or two I have a look at what is happening in the open source world in the space that SAP operates in. A few promising things pop up from time to time but never gets much traction, but it does seem to progress a bit over time, slowly. I think the only thing that will move it forward is if universities put some projects behind it in their business and technology courses.
arethuza 15y ago
Do you think anyone has a copy of SAP at home that they hack on in their own time for their own pleasure? I suspect not... Anyway, I have to repeat my favourite quote about SAP from a Slashdot discussion: "SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world." http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rigged-Product-Demo-In-SAP-Suit-Goes-Missing http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rig... Which I think sums it up nicely.
- Jd 15y ago
  Does anyone have a copy of Google at home that they hack on in their spare time? Or Apple? Or Facebook?
  - freshfey 15y ago
    I think arethuza meant something like the facebook developer platform, xcode (iOS/Mac OS X hacking, read: apps) and the Google API's.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      I think I probably meant the emphasis to be on the "own time for their own pleasure" rather than the "at home" part of my comment. Maybe there should be another version of that silly Gartner diagram where the axes are "importance" and "interestingness" - SAP would be high importance and low interestingness .
      - Jd 15y ago
        Agree with the rephrased emphasis and likely placement on mentioned silly diagram. SAP Streamworks was pretty interesting IMO, but I don't think there was any opportunity to engage independent developers. Hard to expect anything like that out of the depths of the enterprise and (IMO) that is a good reason to produce consumer (e.g. B2C) rather than enterprise (B2B) driven apps.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    I can access Google from home. And Facebook. Which SAP instance are you suggesting to connect to, would I be so inclined? How would you start creating things for SAP vs. for example Facebook (or G+ now, or the Mac Store)? There's a set of companies on the one side with broad public appeal and lots of ways to hack and tinker. On the other side you have a behemoth with an army of suits, costing you a couple of limbs for every move - and it's completely useless for the layman. Note the last statement. If you don't run a business and are in a couple of related positions you just don't care about that stuff. If you are you're probably using and either loathing or loving it. But even if they had SAP in 99% of all companies, they'd still only reach a limited subset of people.
darklajid 15y ago
Okay, let me help the author here. Having success and market penetration doesn't make things cool. It's great for the company, great for the ecosystem (and - that's a topic for another time in this particular case..) built around it. But not cool. Not sexy. It could be. Success, piles of money and 'cool' aren't incompatible per se. They are just unrelated in my book.He has to accept that for a large audience out there, _in the real world_, there's nothing more boring than looking at SAP (and - wait. and wait. and wait). "My advice: stop being bored by the stuff which makes the world turn." My advice: Don't blow this out of proportion. If SAP dies tomorrow, the world is not going to end.
- yuvadam 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by 'SAP dies tomorrow', but - to put it bluntly - YES, the world will most likely stop functioning normally.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    Fair enough. I'm the first to admit that I'm actively avoiding contact w/ that kind of technology (I did develop small things around SAP QA systems in a distant past, but except for that my exposure is limited to watching users around me). To explain: I meant if they go out of business (and I didn't imply that this was even remotely likely). If the software had a kind of stroke and wouldn't work anymore, starting tomorrow, I'd agree with you. I just hate the metrics used and the 'makes the world go 'round' tone in that article. What percentage of shirts, shoes and gadgets are produced in China? Would it be 'cool' (nothing against China..) to be live there, based on the 'We provide x% of the world's shoes' metric?
    - jameshart 15y ago
      > If the software had a kind of stroke and wouldn't work anymore, starting tomorrow, I'd agree with you Well that's interesting, because if the SuccessFactors acquisition is indicative of SAP's intent to become more "cloud based", and those critical infrastructure systems which run on SAP move to the cloud, then if the company went out of business their software would just 'have a stroke'...
chris_dcosta 15y ago
SAP was built in the seventies on seventies technology, which it still uses today (ABAP). None of it's front end reporting tools (even Business Objects) are anything like "modern", and every patch they release is more and more unstable. TechCrunch people know this, I'm sure there are plenty of ex-SAP consultants who got pretty tired of badly run projects by badly educated middle managers who have no business being put in charge of enormous and complex SAP implementations. I have worked for some of the biggest companies in the world fixing some of the rubbish out there, and you know why SAP has so much money? Because the business just order another instance to migrate to each time they mess it up. And so it goes on...
- buyx 15y ago
  I have worked for some of the biggest companies in the world fixing some of the rubbish out there, and you know why SAP has so much money? Because the business just order another instance to migrate to each time they mess it up. SAP seems to run a powerful Reality Distortion Field. I live in a municipality (Johannesburg) that is experiencing a huge multi-year billing crisis, following a flawed SAP implementation. Despite being a disaster, SAP gave it an award: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34778:sap-fails-to-explain-award http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view...
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Awards and spotlights at conferences are how companies like SAP (Oracle has done this too, I assume many "industry success stories" are nothing but this) award managers who generate big profits and who will probably generate even more cleaning up the mess they got into. By branding their failure as a success story, they reduce the likelihood of a change in direction to less flawed approaches and maximize their chances of tying the customer forever. After being awarded "CTO of the year", the incompetent one will probably move on, away from the problem he/she created, and will possibly inflict the same damage to the next company that hires him/her, generating even more profit.
- cbs 15y ago
  SAP was built in the seventies on seventies technology, which it still uses today (ABAP). The Internet was built in the seventies on seventies tech, which it still uses today (IPv4). I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but this is a dumb yardstick to use.
dexen 15y ago
Wait, what? According to his figures, SAP makes $1.18bn profit from $12.46bn revenue (about 10% profit margin); Facebook brings in $1bn profit from $4bn revenue (about 25% profit margin), yet SAP is somehow claimed /more/ interesting? By what metrics? Is SAP somehow gonna grow quicker than Facebook and overtake it? However you slice it, both SAP and Facebook have major share of their respective markets. Facebook seems to monetize the market better. Next story please.
- west1737 15y ago
  Profit margin as the metric for measuring "interesting"? There are lots of reasons fb could be considered interesting, and profit margin is only one and waaay down on the list. How about the fact that fb revolutionized the way people communicate and connect? On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    I don't think you've read the comment you replied to.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Wait, what? According to his figures [...], yet SAP is somehow claimed /more/ interesting? I also like that by his own metrics Facebook has ~800m users, SAP has ~500m users, therefore Facebook is insignificant? But of course, TFA is (apparently) a SAP consultant and his tagline is "Tangential Musings about Enterprise IT". It's not like he's going to say otherwise.
  - johnappleby 15y ago
    Come now, I didn't say that FB is insignificant. That would be ignoring the biggest social trend in the 21st century! What I'm saying is that the consumer press community spends 99% of its time talking about FB et al., who are interesting, cool but haven't got a proven commercial model, and 1% of the time talking about (and denigrating) SAP et al., who run the real software that makes businesses run. And in the meantime, the global economy is going down the drain and Bubble 2.0 means that investors are throwing more of our savings down the drain. Some of the latest startup IPO valuations have been ridiculous. Yes, my primary income is SAP consulting, but that doesn't mean I am not interested in wider IT issues. Facebook is a very relevant trend, but social media is a fickle partner, and the crown has changed hands several times already. Valuing it at 19x earnings is nuts. Please do take a look at the innovations that SAP are doing. I look at wider market trends and I think what SAP is achieving in innovation is well beyond what Oracle/IBM/Microsoft/Google are doing right now. You may be surprised.
richardburton 15y ago
It is so refreshing to see a post about this issue. In a nutshell: profits are cool.
- gordonguthrie 15y ago
  It is astonishing that so many people don't think so. Techcruch think Facebook making an acquisition hire for a couple of guys is more interesting that a founder selling out a company for $3 and a bit billion. You would weep with laughter if it wasn't so tragic.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I don't see any necessary relationship between profits and coolness. Lots of boring things are profitable. In fact many boring things are profitable precisely because their boringness means substantial payment is required to convince anyone to do them.
- altcognito 15y ago
  True Hackers are interested in changing and influencing the world and the way it thinks, profits come secondary.
  - richardburton 15y ago
    Agreed but profits allow you to change the world. Bankruptcy does not.
heresy 15y ago
SAP deployments must work in some cases, surely. I read somewhere that a large part of Apple's supply chain management is built on SAP, as well as being the system of record for iTunes/App Store transactions. I can't find a reliable citation, since this will probably not be something they broadcast, due to their secrecy. But then, they have the capital to massively spend on heavyweight internal systems.
- mbesto 15y ago
  Not sure if their SCM is SAP SCM, but the back-end of Apple is largely run by SAP software.
- johnappleby 15y ago
  Yes, Apple's iTunes store system of record runs on a custom SAP ABAP based system. It used to run SAP ERP but that could not take the load of transactions. As I understand it, this is the reason why you get a weekly bill from Apple: the iTunes ABAP system makes financial postings to ERP, to reduce the overall number of transactions - and presumably also their credit card overhead.
kevinalexbrown 15y ago
What’s wrong with the world is that they are so focussed [sic] on Apple, Google and Facebook – with their over inflated [sic] IPOs and everything that comes with that. The world was not built on technology bubbles – it was built on hard work and honest money. Even if I agree with the author's sentiment, that last line made me laugh. Also: Apple, with their over inflated IPO? (their IPO having been long ago) destroys SAP's revenue and profit. Edit: The world was built on hard work, but I'm not sure how SAP is necessarily the embodiment of that.
icebraining 15y ago
SAP passes an image of a predictable company where innovation doesn't really happen (whether that's true or not is irrelevant - perception is what counts). Money and size is irrelevant. Concrete supports all of our homes, but calling is cool compared to e.g. "ultralight metallic microlattice" [1] is ridiculous by most people's definition of cool. [1]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-material-on-earth.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-...
- dextorious 15y ago
  """whether that's true or not is irrelevant - perception is what counts""" Actually, no. Reality is what counts. I don't bet my money based on perception, and neither I trade with perception in mind. Except if I'm looking to take advantage of some bubble.
  - danssig 15y ago
    >and neither I trade with perception in mind Then I'd be surprised if you do well in trading. For monetary value; perceived value is value. We have no other means of valuing things monetarily.
    - altcognito 15y ago
      Yes, because we all know what a reliable guide to value trading has been over the past three decades. To some extent entrepreneurship found in technology has been the counter-culture to the con game that the financial markets have become accustomed to.
      - danssig 15y ago
        Again wrong. How do you think entrepreneurs are pricing their wares if not by perceived value? Did you think they were doing something like "labor cost + 20%" or something? The cost of making something is only used to determine price floor (i.e. if perceived value is lower than the price floor it makes no sense to create this product).
rythie 15y ago
Disruption and innovation is cool, not big companies relying on a cash cow business model created decades ago.
- ibisum 15y ago
  Right. Cool is not sustainable. Got it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
egor83 15y ago
There's one thing he forgot to compare: number of employees. According to Wikipedia, Facebook has 3000+ employees, and SAP AG has 53513. So, profit per employee is ~300k for FB and 22k for SAP.
- johnappleby 15y ago
  Interesting comparison and let's be fair: Facebook's EBIT (which is the real financial comparison) is pretty decent. SAP's EBIT was pretty low in 2010 - expect it to increase in 2011 based on preliminary results. Main point is FB's financial model isn't proven medium-term. Also SAP have a lot of low-cost employees in India/China. Hard to compare with FB really.
- dextorious 15y ago
  And this metric matters over profits because? If I have a 1,000,000 person company that has 1 bln in profits, and you have a 100 person company that makes 10 million in profits, you make 100 mores per employee. But I get to bank a cool billion...
  - lmm 15y ago
    Sure, but mine is probably a more interesting company for TechCrunch to write stories about. It's more likely to be innovating in ways that readers will care about.
brd 15y ago
So I'm just going to throw it out there that I'm a young SAP Developer. I've been known as an "up and comer" in the community (yes, we have a community) until I decided I was no longer sure I wanted SAP to be my long term career choice. I've done SAP hacking on the side on multiple occasions and I've even made money from a little side project that won a SAP innocentive challenge. For all of you SAP naysayers (I oftentimes find myself among you) the best explanation I've ever heard for why to work in the SAP ecosystem is "If you want to change the world, you should work with the biggest lever you can find". Feel free to ask questions.
- kokey 15y ago
  Nice to hear. I have a couple of questions: 1. Is the community open to all or do you need to be working for a SAP customer? 2. What's the simplest way to get set up to start tinkering with some SAP stuff? 3. Can you mention some interesting projects that you've done or was done by others?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - brd 15y ago
    1) The community is open to the public: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index -> Not a member? -> Public User 2) The main platform can be downloaded here: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/nw-downloads http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/nw-downloads -> Choose a developer edition Application Server. You can also find and download a trial of gateway, (mobile platform) business objects, (analytic) etc if you look around. I'm actually not so familiar with whats actively available these days. 3) johnappleby is probably better qualified to answer this question at this point but I will tell you to look into SAPlink since its considered the "open source enabler" of SAP http://code.google.com/p/saplink/ http://code.google.com/p/saplink/ you can also check out the enterprise geeks, good light-hearted site for SAP content http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/projects/ http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/projects/ I built a framework for integrating data between SAP's cloud offering and their on premise solutions but after unsuccessfully trying to opensource it in collaboration with SAP (a frustrating experience) I pretty much stopped my community activities. That experience sucked a lot of the SAP enthusiasm out of me but I have watched the company get much better over the last 2 years and I am in talks about getting involved in an another open source project sometime in the next few months.
djhworld 15y ago
Some of our applications here push a bunch of data to SAP via their API To be honest I have no idea what SAP does nor do I really care, we just push a load of data over a network on a regular basis and the team who deal with SAP probably do something. They all have to wear suits though while us Java programmers get to kick back in normal, comfortable clothing.
djhworld 15y ago
Also I think the main reason why no one talks about SAP is because SAP == Work whereas sitting at home and hacking together your own open source project outside of work hours? A welcome break. To me: - * Java EE == my day job == Work * SAP == Work * Working on own app at home written in Haskell == Fun hobby project that I do outside of work hours and doesn't feel like work
Havoc 15y ago
I'm saddened by the fact that this is #2 on HN. The entire thing is one big fat straw-man argument. The author (the bored one) didn't even mention FB in the article in question. The author (the attacking one) pulled that out of thin air based on little more than: >From what I get of her article, if it’s not Apple or a startup, she’s not interested Then he proceeds to refute the argument that he just set up by enlisting stats...not even convincing ones at that. And finally whether something is boring or not is entirely subjective. This angle is as pointless as proving to stamp collectors that collecting stamps is boring. I agree with his point in that the glamorous companies get attention at the cost of others & that this is a problem. The manner in which it was done however is a fine example of: >a crap piece of journalism
- johnappleby 15y ago
  Can't argue - it was a reactionary response, such is the way of social media, right? I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. HN readers perhaps might get some benefit from understanding SAP technologies and how they integrate into the stuff they want to hack with. I've employed some real hackers into the SAP market and it is a deeply interesting and open technology stack.
  - Havoc 15y ago
    >I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. That it is. Clearly SAP is doing something right. Somewhat off topic, I'm surprised you say "open technology stack". I'm not particularly familiar with SAP tech, but I always thought they were as closed as it gets (& successfully so). Have I missed something?
kennystone 15y ago
It's a humorous article. TC knows their crowd, and they are poking fun at everyone - themselves for not caring about a huge deal, their audience for also not caring, enterprise software for being boring.
davidhansen 15y ago
The article is poorly written, and SAP is indefensible as a company. That said, welcome to my world. It's been an interesting experience working in an industry (ecommerce) that is regarded as a huge yawnfest by most of the startup community. The reality is that there really are very interesting problems to solve. Algorithms to predict demand curves, optimize warehouse pullbox location, and identify product flow constraints are all arguably more interesting problems to solve than sharing photos. Nonetheless, nobody cares. And that's fine, mostly.
- AndyNemmity 15y ago
  "SAP is indefensible as a company." What does that even mean?
  - davidhansen 15y ago
    As others have remarked in this thread, their products are maintenance and UX nightmares, and their sales and legal departments operate on the basis of "do lots of evil". I suppose it was an exaggerated choice of term, but I was trying to set aside the specific issue of SAP to talk about the somewhat broader issue of how the tech community often finds technology boring if it doesn't appear in the form of a consumer app.
    - Havoc 15y ago
      It is difficult arguing with results. I can't personally judge SAP particularly well, but its interesting to me that they are so successful in the long run despite "UX nightmares" & evil sales dept. That to me suggests that they are doing something else right which is worth paying attention to.
      - benjvi 15y ago
        Maybe they re better at capturing value than at creating it?
      - mistermumble 15y ago
pinaceae 15y ago
let's put it this way: on any large german airport you currently get met with large billboards by IBM, advertising their urgent need for SAP consultants. SAP is the backbone of the large tech consulting industry. and no, you cannot compare it to facebook. like comparing a tv station to a manufacturing company.
dexen 15y ago
The article establishes and uses a brand new metric: SAP's technology must be interesting for develpers because it costs exorbitant amount of money to hire anybody to work on it. SAP is interesting for investors because it pulls in massive 10% profit margin. SAP's services are interesting for customers because it has high barriers to deploy, maintain and replace. SAP is interesting By comparison, Facebook-like projects must be boring for developers because they flock to work on them, even if for free or `ramen-profitable' for year or two. Facebook is boring for investors because it manages mere 25% profit margin. Facebook is boring for users because barriers to entry and exit are essentially non-existent. What kind of metrics is that?
jroseattle 15y ago
From the article: "Well for my money SAP is possibly the most interesting technology firm in the world right now." To be sure, what trips one's trigger may not do so for another, so to each his own. That said, this is just a synopsis of one guy's very tiny view on the world. To the original author: the value of an acquisition doesn't set the pace for what's interesting. If that were the case, Exxon would be the single most interesting thing on the planet. Rather than bitching about someone else not writing about something that interests you, why not start the Enterprise IT version of TechCrunch?
russell 15y ago
I'm curious. Are any of you working on commercial ERP products or services? It seems to me that there is lots of opportunity there for well executed vertical applications.
- RvbNews 15y ago
  I do. Not SAP. but Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has an ERP product. (a 'suite' even: Dynamics) I've also worked with another ERP product. And you are right, there are a lot of opportunities, but it is also hard to get a foothold.
tryitnow 15y ago
I work in finance and I use SAP. Or more accurately, I try my best to delegate any SAP tasks to my co-workers because I swear I lose IQ points whenever I interact with SAP. Is it dull? It depends. For the TC crowd, yes, but that's because they're consumer oriented and not very technical. It should be interesting to the HN crowd because it's a huge opportunity for disruptive innovation.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
On the one hand the author is right about how SAP is a behemoth and shouldn't be written off. On the other hand, this is TechCrunch we're talking about. Do we really expect them to cover SAP? TC has its niche and I'm not surprised at all. I think however the mistake on the part of TC wasn't not covering SAP but covering it in the way they did. If you're going to write an article about how the company is boring and dedicate the majority of the content to why you don't want to cover it then just don't cover it at all. It would look better for them had they just said nothing at all. That said, the author of this post has an opinion. Cool. We all have opinions. But he was off the mark in implying that there's something wrong with techcrunch. There isn't. They're all about the cool factor and dare I say shallow startup porn. The post was almost a great point but the implication that something is wrong with TechCrunch killed it. I'm not a fan of techcrunch. I think it's shallow garbage and reads like a thinly veiled commercial a lot of times. But I won't be writing any blog posts complaining about that any time soon. That's what we've come to expect from them and their audience loves it.
potatolicious 15y ago
I'm interested in hearing what the author has to say about this topic, I'm really not interested in this new FOX/CNN trend of quoting random people on Twitter, even if they're semi-famous. This is somewhat OT, but can we stop with this? Quoting the immature salvos fired between random people on Twitter doesn't give your blog post any more credibility, and probably less. It's like news networks nowadays - they're more interested in what people on Twitter and YouTube think of some topic rather than seasoned analysts and correspondents. The whole blog post would've been just as informative and way less irritating if I didn't have to wade through all the Twitspeak.
pbreit 15y ago
The thing is, if SAP did not exist there would still be some piece of crappy software running all those transactions. Maybe it'd be custom, maybe Accenture, whatever. In fact, many (most?) SAP installations are barely recognizable after the customization. And who can even guess what SuccessFactors does besides not make much money.

224 points by zalthor 15y ago

Jd 15y ago

If any SAP consultants are out there reading this, can you give me some insights on how to get up to speed with the SAP products and ecosystem? I'm a developer/consultant (primarily Salesforce) but am interested in exploring SAP product offerings. Infos in profile. I think there are probably many of us that are interested in this side of the "enterprise" but SAP is sort of its own universe and difficult to understand/penetrate from the outside.

kokey 15y ago
I think interesting documentation in this regard would be nice. I believe there's a lot of space for developers to support small companies that aren't big enough to buy into SAP yet, but would benefit from other products and tools that can give them the same functionally. More importantly, have the benefit of their business processes being SAP friendly, but also allow other products to offer some of the same functionality for cheaper. My hope is that some of these products could grow to become a competitor to SAP.
zalthor 15y ago
The problem is that most of the legal documentation available are really boring power point presentations that provide as little technical information as possible. Most of their detailed documentation is only available for people who take up their courses (yes, they are that evil) and certification exams. I do remember quite a bit of it was available on rapidshare though unless you were already working on something specific you wouldn't know what exactly to search for. To start with, I would suggesting getting a book on SAP R/3. More specifically the SAP R/3 handbook by Jose Antonio Hernandez. I don't know of any thing available for free (legally) that is as good a place to start. As for the product offerings from SAP, they more or less seem to be components that sit on the same application stack. So getting into one of these applications could provide insight into what everything else does. Disclaimer: I work as an SAP Basis consultant (that's sort of an application admin + OS admin + DBA)
- Jd 15y ago
  Thanks, added to my Amazon wishlist! I'm planning to pull aside some SAP consultants at some point soon and get them to show me the inner workings of the SAP stack. It is amazing to me that they only provide documentation to people who take their courses.
dhoe 15y ago
SAP is one of my focus areas at work. My answer would be to install the trial version (which I think is no longer called miniSAP, but used to be), try to get the general hang of how it's supposed to work, and then dig deeper in the areas that interest you, maybe Java or ABAP development if you want to do development. Last time I've used it, the trial version had a 90 days license, but you could renew it easily and legally. You won't get a SAP job that way, but it might give you enough of an edge to take on SAP-related projects (think "sure, I've done webservice calls into Salesforce and I know how that works with SAP XI, happy to work on your integration project").
tg3 15y ago
help.sap.com Or take a really expensive class from SAP (usually paid for by your employer). The truth is that (it seems as though) SAP doesn't want people to be familiar with the system. Their distribution channel is consultants, and consultants make more money if the system is opaque and hard to get up to speed on. This will be the downfall of SAP as we know it IMO (and Oracle, and every other enterprise application that relies on a technical consultant's input), the deliberate opacity of the system for the sake of the distribution channel.
- pauljonas 15y ago
  ^^ This. ^^ Proprietary lock-in (or dial up the "exclusivity" meter on knowledge and any budding subject matter experts). Enroll some of the customer personnel in expensive training only available from SAP (or SAP "approved" vendors). Contrast to open source models where anybody can become fluent with the code or platform and can be hired or contracted to work at a fraction of the rate a SAP (or to be fair, any proprietary, lock-in "turnkey" "solution"). While I departed the corporate IT world a few years, I have seen the same shenanigans with the likes of Oracle, SAP and others too remote to be recognized by many here. In fact, I owned a company that profited as a "service partner" for a data communications legacy "commerce" software suite maker.

zedonious_sq 15y ago

Author's primary income comes via SAP products

johnappleby 15y ago
For sure, and I'm open and honest about that :) I would like to say a few things though, especially to those people who think that it's an us and them scenario. First, I have personally spent a lot of time on open source software, and you will for example find some of my code in the Linux Kernel, if someone hasn't removed it by now. Second, I think that closed communities are a bad thing, and it's something I strongly believe that SAP needs to get better at. Yes, SAP has the largest community network in the world with 3 million members. But it's not good enough at opening that up to the wider tech community, which is a loss. Third, I think that integration to the wider tech community like HN, would be a huge benefit to Enterprise IT. We can be silo'd and the expertise of this group in writing nice-to-use apps is something we really need.

kokey 15y ago

I think the same can be said for 'boring' non-tech industries, like energy, transport, finance, food retail etc. These are essential industries that make the world turn, but because they lack the 'cool' factor they also get the blame for many of the ills in the world. This is while the entertainment industry (film, games, art, music) can shrink by 90% without causing much damage, are often considered less evil or even more important than those who provide the essentials. I don't think the world has gone mad, I just think it's how the world is perceived from by different age groups. When you are a teenager you think you'll never stop listening to the cool new music when you are older, but when you are older you realise the latest craze is cute but not that relevant. On a different tangent, every year or two I have a look at what is happening in the open source world in the space that SAP operates in. A few promising things pop up from time to time but never gets much traction, but it does seem to progress a bit over time, slowly. I think the only thing that will move it forward is if universities put some projects behind it in their business and technology courses.

arethuza 15y ago

Do you think anyone has a copy of SAP at home that they hack on in their own time for their own pleasure? I suspect not... Anyway, I have to repeat my favourite quote about SAP from a Slashdot discussion: "SAP is how Lucifer interacts with our world." http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rigged-Product-Demo-In-SAP-Suit-Goes-Missing http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/Allegedly-Rig... Which I think sums it up nicely.

Jd 15y ago
Does anyone have a copy of Google at home that they hack on in their spare time? Or Apple? Or Facebook?
- freshfey 15y ago
  I think arethuza meant something like the facebook developer platform, xcode (iOS/Mac OS X hacking, read: apps) and the Google API's.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    I think I probably meant the emphasis to be on the "own time for their own pleasure" rather than the "at home" part of my comment. Maybe there should be another version of that silly Gartner diagram where the axes are "importance" and "interestingness" - SAP would be high importance and low interestingness .
    - Jd 15y ago
      Agree with the rephrased emphasis and likely placement on mentioned silly diagram. SAP Streamworks was pretty interesting IMO, but I don't think there was any opportunity to engage independent developers. Hard to expect anything like that out of the depths of the enterprise and (IMO) that is a good reason to produce consumer (e.g. B2C) rather than enterprise (B2B) driven apps.
- darklajid 15y ago
  I can access Google from home. And Facebook. Which SAP instance are you suggesting to connect to, would I be so inclined? How would you start creating things for SAP vs. for example Facebook (or G+ now, or the Mac Store)? There's a set of companies on the one side with broad public appeal and lots of ways to hack and tinker. On the other side you have a behemoth with an army of suits, costing you a couple of limbs for every move - and it's completely useless for the layman. Note the last statement. If you don't run a business and are in a couple of related positions you just don't care about that stuff. If you are you're probably using and either loathing or loving it. But even if they had SAP in 99% of all companies, they'd still only reach a limited subset of people.

darklajid 15y ago

Okay, let me help the author here. Having success and market penetration doesn't make things cool. It's great for the company, great for the ecosystem (and - that's a topic for another time in this particular case..) built around it. But not cool. Not sexy. It could be. Success, piles of money and 'cool' aren't incompatible per se. They are just unrelated in my book.He has to accept that for a large audience out there, _in the real world_, there's nothing more boring than looking at SAP (and - wait. and wait. and wait). "My advice: stop being bored by the stuff which makes the world turn." My advice: Don't blow this out of proportion. If SAP dies tomorrow, the world is not going to end.

yuvadam 15y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by 'SAP dies tomorrow', but - to put it bluntly - YES, the world will most likely stop functioning normally.
- darklajid 15y ago
  Fair enough. I'm the first to admit that I'm actively avoiding contact w/ that kind of technology (I did develop small things around SAP QA systems in a distant past, but except for that my exposure is limited to watching users around me). To explain: I meant if they go out of business (and I didn't imply that this was even remotely likely). If the software had a kind of stroke and wouldn't work anymore, starting tomorrow, I'd agree with you. I just hate the metrics used and the 'makes the world go 'round' tone in that article. What percentage of shirts, shoes and gadgets are produced in China? Would it be 'cool' (nothing against China..) to be live there, based on the 'We provide x% of the world's shoes' metric?
  - jameshart 15y ago
    > If the software had a kind of stroke and wouldn't work anymore, starting tomorrow, I'd agree with you Well that's interesting, because if the SuccessFactors acquisition is indicative of SAP's intent to become more "cloud based", and those critical infrastructure systems which run on SAP move to the cloud, then if the company went out of business their software would just 'have a stroke'...

chris_dcosta 15y ago

SAP was built in the seventies on seventies technology, which it still uses today (ABAP). None of it's front end reporting tools (even Business Objects) are anything like "modern", and every patch they release is more and more unstable. TechCrunch people know this, I'm sure there are plenty of ex-SAP consultants who got pretty tired of badly run projects by badly educated middle managers who have no business being put in charge of enormous and complex SAP implementations. I have worked for some of the biggest companies in the world fixing some of the rubbish out there, and you know why SAP has so much money? Because the business just order another instance to migrate to each time they mess it up. And so it goes on...

buyx 15y ago
I have worked for some of the biggest companies in the world fixing some of the rubbish out there, and you know why SAP has so much money? Because the business just order another instance to migrate to each time they mess it up. SAP seems to run a powerful Reality Distortion Field. I live in a municipality (Johannesburg) that is experiencing a huge multi-year billing crisis, following a flawed SAP implementation. Despite being a disaster, SAP gave it an award: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34778:sap-fails-to-explain-award http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Awards and spotlights at conferences are how companies like SAP (Oracle has done this too, I assume many "industry success stories" are nothing but this) award managers who generate big profits and who will probably generate even more cleaning up the mess they got into. By branding their failure as a success story, they reduce the likelihood of a change in direction to less flawed approaches and maximize their chances of tying the customer forever. After being awarded "CTO of the year", the incompetent one will probably move on, away from the problem he/she created, and will possibly inflict the same damage to the next company that hires him/her, generating even more profit.
cbs 15y ago
SAP was built in the seventies on seventies technology, which it still uses today (ABAP). The Internet was built in the seventies on seventies tech, which it still uses today (IPv4). I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but this is a dumb yardstick to use.

dexen 15y ago

Wait, what? According to his figures, SAP makes $1.18bn profit from $12.46bn revenue (about 10% profit margin); Facebook brings in $1bn profit from $4bn revenue (about 25% profit margin), yet SAP is somehow claimed /more/ interesting? By what metrics? Is SAP somehow gonna grow quicker than Facebook and overtake it? However you slice it, both SAP and Facebook have major share of their respective markets. Facebook seems to monetize the market better. Next story please.

west1737 15y ago
Profit margin as the metric for measuring "interesting"? There are lots of reasons fb could be considered interesting, and profit margin is only one and waaay down on the list. How about the fact that fb revolutionized the way people communicate and connect? On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
- masklinn 15y ago
  I don't think you've read the comment you replied to.
masklinn 15y ago
> Wait, what? According to his figures [...], yet SAP is somehow claimed /more/ interesting? I also like that by his own metrics Facebook has ~800m users, SAP has ~500m users, therefore Facebook is insignificant? But of course, TFA is (apparently) a SAP consultant and his tagline is "Tangential Musings about Enterprise IT". It's not like he's going to say otherwise.
- johnappleby 15y ago
  Come now, I didn't say that FB is insignificant. That would be ignoring the biggest social trend in the 21st century! What I'm saying is that the consumer press community spends 99% of its time talking about FB et al., who are interesting, cool but haven't got a proven commercial model, and 1% of the time talking about (and denigrating) SAP et al., who run the real software that makes businesses run. And in the meantime, the global economy is going down the drain and Bubble 2.0 means that investors are throwing more of our savings down the drain. Some of the latest startup IPO valuations have been ridiculous. Yes, my primary income is SAP consulting, but that doesn't mean I am not interested in wider IT issues. Facebook is a very relevant trend, but social media is a fickle partner, and the crown has changed hands several times already. Valuing it at 19x earnings is nuts. Please do take a look at the innovations that SAP are doing. I look at wider market trends and I think what SAP is achieving in innovation is well beyond what Oracle/IBM/Microsoft/Google are doing right now. You may be surprised.

richardburton 15y ago

It is so refreshing to see a post about this issue. In a nutshell: profits are cool.

gordonguthrie 15y ago
It is astonishing that so many people don't think so. Techcruch think Facebook making an acquisition hire for a couple of guys is more interesting that a founder selling out a company for $3 and a bit billion. You would weep with laughter if it wasn't so tragic.
_delirium 15y ago
I don't see any necessary relationship between profits and coolness. Lots of boring things are profitable. In fact many boring things are profitable precisely because their boringness means substantial payment is required to convince anyone to do them.
altcognito 15y ago
True Hackers are interested in changing and influencing the world and the way it thinks, profits come secondary.
- richardburton 15y ago
  Agreed but profits allow you to change the world. Bankruptcy does not.

heresy 15y ago

SAP deployments must work in some cases, surely. I read somewhere that a large part of Apple's supply chain management is built on SAP, as well as being the system of record for iTunes/App Store transactions. I can't find a reliable citation, since this will probably not be something they broadcast, due to their secrecy. But then, they have the capital to massively spend on heavyweight internal systems.

mbesto 15y ago
Not sure if their SCM is SAP SCM, but the back-end of Apple is largely run by SAP software.
johnappleby 15y ago
Yes, Apple's iTunes store system of record runs on a custom SAP ABAP based system. It used to run SAP ERP but that could not take the load of transactions. As I understand it, this is the reason why you get a weekly bill from Apple: the iTunes ABAP system makes financial postings to ERP, to reduce the overall number of transactions - and presumably also their credit card overhead.

kevinalexbrown 15y ago

What’s wrong with the world is that they are so focussed [sic] on Apple, Google and Facebook – with their over inflated [sic] IPOs and everything that comes with that. The world was not built on technology bubbles – it was built on hard work and honest money. Even if I agree with the author's sentiment, that last line made me laugh. Also: Apple, with their over inflated IPO? (their IPO having been long ago) destroys SAP's revenue and profit. Edit: The world was built on hard work, but I'm not sure how SAP is necessarily the embodiment of that.

icebraining 15y ago

SAP passes an image of a predictable company where innovation doesn't really happen (whether that's true or not is irrelevant - perception is what counts). Money and size is irrelevant. Concrete supports all of our homes, but calling is cool compared to e.g. "ultralight metallic microlattice" [1] is ridiculous by most people's definition of cool. [1]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-material-on-earth.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-...

dextorious 15y ago
"""whether that's true or not is irrelevant - perception is what counts""" Actually, no. Reality is what counts. I don't bet my money based on perception, and neither I trade with perception in mind. Except if I'm looking to take advantage of some bubble.
- danssig 15y ago
  >and neither I trade with perception in mind Then I'd be surprised if you do well in trading. For monetary value; perceived value is value. We have no other means of valuing things monetarily.
  - altcognito 15y ago
    Yes, because we all know what a reliable guide to value trading has been over the past three decades. To some extent entrepreneurship found in technology has been the counter-culture to the con game that the financial markets have become accustomed to.
    - danssig 15y ago
      Again wrong. How do you think entrepreneurs are pricing their wares if not by perceived value? Did you think they were doing something like "labor cost + 20%" or something? The cost of making something is only used to determine price floor (i.e. if perceived value is lower than the price floor it makes no sense to create this product).

rythie 15y ago

Disruption and innovation is cool, not big companies relying on a cash cow business model created decades ago.

ibisum 15y ago
Right. Cool is not sustainable. Got it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

egor83 15y ago

There's one thing he forgot to compare: number of employees. According to Wikipedia, Facebook has 3000+ employees, and SAP AG has 53513. So, profit per employee is ~300k for FB and 22k for SAP.

johnappleby 15y ago
Interesting comparison and let's be fair: Facebook's EBIT (which is the real financial comparison) is pretty decent. SAP's EBIT was pretty low in 2010 - expect it to increase in 2011 based on preliminary results. Main point is FB's financial model isn't proven medium-term. Also SAP have a lot of low-cost employees in India/China. Hard to compare with FB really.
dextorious 15y ago
And this metric matters over profits because? If I have a 1,000,000 person company that has 1 bln in profits, and you have a 100 person company that makes 10 million in profits, you make 100 mores per employee. But I get to bank a cool billion...
- lmm 15y ago
  Sure, but mine is probably a more interesting company for TechCrunch to write stories about. It's more likely to be innovating in ways that readers will care about.

brd 15y ago

So I'm just going to throw it out there that I'm a young SAP Developer. I've been known as an "up and comer" in the community (yes, we have a community) until I decided I was no longer sure I wanted SAP to be my long term career choice. I've done SAP hacking on the side on multiple occasions and I've even made money from a little side project that won a SAP innocentive challenge. For all of you SAP naysayers (I oftentimes find myself among you) the best explanation I've ever heard for why to work in the SAP ecosystem is "If you want to change the world, you should work with the biggest lever you can find". Feel free to ask questions.

kokey 15y ago
Nice to hear. I have a couple of questions: 1. Is the community open to all or do you need to be working for a SAP customer? 2. What's the simplest way to get set up to start tinkering with some SAP stuff? 3. Can you mention some interesting projects that you've done or was done by others?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- brd 15y ago
  1) The community is open to the public: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index -> Not a member? -> Public User 2) The main platform can be downloaded here: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/nw-downloads http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/nw-downloads -> Choose a developer edition Application Server. You can also find and download a trial of gateway, (mobile platform) business objects, (analytic) etc if you look around. I'm actually not so familiar with whats actively available these days. 3) johnappleby is probably better qualified to answer this question at this point but I will tell you to look into SAPlink since its considered the "open source enabler" of SAP http://code.google.com/p/saplink/ http://code.google.com/p/saplink/ you can also check out the enterprise geeks, good light-hearted site for SAP content http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/projects/ http://enterprisegeeks.com/blog/projects/ I built a framework for integrating data between SAP's cloud offering and their on premise solutions but after unsuccessfully trying to opensource it in collaboration with SAP (a frustrating experience) I pretty much stopped my community activities. That experience sucked a lot of the SAP enthusiasm out of me but I have watched the company get much better over the last 2 years and I am in talks about getting involved in an another open source project sometime in the next few months.

djhworld 15y ago

Some of our applications here push a bunch of data to SAP via their API To be honest I have no idea what SAP does nor do I really care, we just push a load of data over a network on a regular basis and the team who deal with SAP probably do something. They all have to wear suits though while us Java programmers get to kick back in normal, comfortable clothing.

djhworld 15y ago

Also I think the main reason why no one talks about SAP is because SAP == Work whereas sitting at home and hacking together your own open source project outside of work hours? A welcome break. To me: - * Java EE == my day job == Work * SAP == Work * Working on own app at home written in Haskell == Fun hobby project that I do outside of work hours and doesn't feel like work

Havoc 15y ago

I'm saddened by the fact that this is #2 on HN. The entire thing is one big fat straw-man argument. The author (the bored one) didn't even mention FB in the article in question. The author (the attacking one) pulled that out of thin air based on little more than: >From what I get of her article, if it’s not Apple or a startup, she’s not interested Then he proceeds to refute the argument that he just set up by enlisting stats...not even convincing ones at that. And finally whether something is boring or not is entirely subjective. This angle is as pointless as proving to stamp collectors that collecting stamps is boring. I agree with his point in that the glamorous companies get attention at the cost of others & that this is a problem. The manner in which it was done however is a fine example of: >a crap piece of journalism

johnappleby 15y ago
Can't argue - it was a reactionary response, such is the way of social media, right? I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. HN readers perhaps might get some benefit from understanding SAP technologies and how they integrate into the stuff they want to hack with. I've employed some real hackers into the SAP market and it is a deeply interesting and open technology stack.
- Havoc 15y ago
  >I think that the underlying discussion is an interesting one. That it is. Clearly SAP is doing something right. Somewhat off topic, I'm surprised you say "open technology stack". I'm not particularly familiar with SAP tech, but I always thought they were as closed as it gets (& successfully so). Have I missed something?

kennystone 15y ago

It's a humorous article. TC knows their crowd, and they are poking fun at everyone - themselves for not caring about a huge deal, their audience for also not caring, enterprise software for being boring.

davidhansen 15y ago

The article is poorly written, and SAP is indefensible as a company. That said, welcome to my world. It's been an interesting experience working in an industry (ecommerce) that is regarded as a huge yawnfest by most of the startup community. The reality is that there really are very interesting problems to solve. Algorithms to predict demand curves, optimize warehouse pullbox location, and identify product flow constraints are all arguably more interesting problems to solve than sharing photos. Nonetheless, nobody cares. And that's fine, mostly.

AndyNemmity 15y ago
"SAP is indefensible as a company." What does that even mean?
- davidhansen 15y ago
  As others have remarked in this thread, their products are maintenance and UX nightmares, and their sales and legal departments operate on the basis of "do lots of evil". I suppose it was an exaggerated choice of term, but I was trying to set aside the specific issue of SAP to talk about the somewhat broader issue of how the tech community often finds technology boring if it doesn't appear in the form of a consumer app.
  - Havoc 15y ago
    It is difficult arguing with results. I can't personally judge SAP particularly well, but its interesting to me that they are so successful in the long run despite "UX nightmares" & evil sales dept. That to me suggests that they are doing something else right which is worth paying attention to.
    - benjvi 15y ago
      Maybe they re better at capturing value than at creating it?
    - mistermumble 15y ago

pinaceae 15y ago

let's put it this way: on any large german airport you currently get met with large billboards by IBM, advertising their urgent need for SAP consultants. SAP is the backbone of the large tech consulting industry. and no, you cannot compare it to facebook. like comparing a tv station to a manufacturing company.

dexen 15y ago

The article establishes and uses a brand new metric: SAP's technology must be interesting for develpers because it costs exorbitant amount of money to hire anybody to work on it. SAP is interesting for investors because it pulls in massive 10% profit margin. SAP's services are interesting for customers because it has high barriers to deploy, maintain and replace. SAP is interesting By comparison, Facebook-like projects must be boring for developers because they flock to work on them, even if for free or `ramen-profitable' for year or two. Facebook is boring for investors because it manages mere 25% profit margin. Facebook is boring for users because barriers to entry and exit are essentially non-existent. What kind of metrics is that?

jroseattle 15y ago

From the article: "Well for my money SAP is possibly the most interesting technology firm in the world right now." To be sure, what trips one's trigger may not do so for another, so to each his own. That said, this is just a synopsis of one guy's very tiny view on the world. To the original author: the value of an acquisition doesn't set the pace for what's interesting. If that were the case, Exxon would be the single most interesting thing on the planet. Rather than bitching about someone else not writing about something that interests you, why not start the Enterprise IT version of TechCrunch?

russell 15y ago

I'm curious. Are any of you working on commercial ERP products or services? It seems to me that there is lots of opportunity there for well executed vertical applications.

RvbNews 15y ago
I do. Not SAP. but Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft has an ERP product. (a 'suite' even: Dynamics) I've also worked with another ERP product. And you are right, there are a lot of opportunities, but it is also hard to get a foothold.

tryitnow 15y ago

I work in finance and I use SAP. Or more accurately, I try my best to delegate any SAP tasks to my co-workers because I swear I lose IQ points whenever I interact with SAP. Is it dull? It depends. For the TC crowd, yes, but that's because they're consumer oriented and not very technical. It should be interesting to the HN crowd because it's a huge opportunity for disruptive innovation.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

On the one hand the author is right about how SAP is a behemoth and shouldn't be written off. On the other hand, this is TechCrunch we're talking about. Do we really expect them to cover SAP? TC has its niche and I'm not surprised at all. I think however the mistake on the part of TC wasn't not covering SAP but covering it in the way they did. If you're going to write an article about how the company is boring and dedicate the majority of the content to why you don't want to cover it then just don't cover it at all. It would look better for them had they just said nothing at all. That said, the author of this post has an opinion. Cool. We all have opinions. But he was off the mark in implying that there's something wrong with techcrunch. There isn't. They're all about the cool factor and dare I say shallow startup porn. The post was almost a great point but the implication that something is wrong with TechCrunch killed it. I'm not a fan of techcrunch. I think it's shallow garbage and reads like a thinly veiled commercial a lot of times. But I won't be writing any blog posts complaining about that any time soon. That's what we've come to expect from them and their audience loves it.

potatolicious 15y ago

I'm interested in hearing what the author has to say about this topic, I'm really not interested in this new FOX/CNN trend of quoting random people on Twitter, even if they're semi-famous. This is somewhat OT, but can we stop with this? Quoting the immature salvos fired between random people on Twitter doesn't give your blog post any more credibility, and probably less. It's like news networks nowadays - they're more interested in what people on Twitter and YouTube think of some topic rather than seasoned analysts and correspondents. The whole blog post would've been just as informative and way less irritating if I didn't have to wade through all the Twitspeak.

pbreit 15y ago

The thing is, if SAP did not exist there would still be some piece of crappy software running all those transactions. Maybe it'd be custom, maybe Accenture, whatever. In fact, many (most?) SAP installations are barely recognizable after the customization. And who can even guess what SuccessFactors does besides not make much money.