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taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

My current workplace has implemented a custom SAP HANA-based solution for forecasting (code is written in a mixture of Python and R). I wasn't involved in the project but I'm not convinced it couldn't have been architected completely differently - perhaps a suite of microservices running on K8S with a PostgreSQL backend. Having an in-memory database licensed by RAM usage quickly gets mother-f'ing expensive as Nathan Fielder would say.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Trivia time...

Back in the 90s Sybase was the only "major" database that SAP didn't support, ostensibly because it didn't support row-level locking, only page-level. Support for SQL Server 6.5 was added in 1993/1994 with the assistance of Microsoft (SQL Server also only supported page-level locking at the time and was still based largely on Sybase). Sybase ASE was only supported by SAP many years later, after they'd bought the company (primarily, I believe for the now-discontinued mobile products).

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Yes, fair point - I didn't explain myself clearly (I've been commenting too much in this thread as it is!). My thinking is that why would they speak up? Lidl has deep pockets so the thinking was probably "another $5/10/20 million will get the project over the line". Not looking at the project and saying "we've billed you so much already, we've delivered something that's not fit for purpose so we'll absorb some of that and get something that works".

For all its faults, SAP is the market leader ERP. Without knowing anything more than what I've read in the general press, I'm fairly confident that the implementation could have been a success.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

It's an interesting observation. SAP has opened up some of their offerings (like OpenUI5) but there's been very little buy-in. Perhaps it's also partly due to the earlier comments from then-SAP CTO Shai Agassi claiming that open source stimulates innovation? Maybe it's because the products aren't great (I'm no fan of UI5).

FWIW, I'm a massive HANA skeptic - I think it's overpriced and SAP betting the farm on it a few years ago wasn't necessarily the best option. It's a product that was put together from various disparate components - TREX, P*TIME (from Transact in Memory), etc - and that shows. It hangs together like something made of brown paper and string, with so many tuneables it puts Oracle to shame.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Agreed! SAP's GUI is generally terrible for occasional users (luckily most have now been moved to web-based applications, of varying levels of user friendliness), but in the hands of experienced back office staff it works well. Not pretty, but very functional and with shortcuts for everything.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Agree 100% - NIH is a huge thing with SAP, along with very often picking the wrong horse (Silverlight anyone?). They've also built their new PaaS using Cloud Foundry, which I'm not certain about...

I'm glad that someone else feels the same way I do about OData and UI5. I've used both extensively (initially to learn more about them and then because I need to develop solutions that can be supported by customers) and neither is, well, ideal. The worst is that the SAP ecosystem is a massive echo chamber, filled with fanboys saying how wonderful OData and UI5 are. Really, they're not - UI5 is open source and yet no-one uses it. Why? And let me not get started with CAP (WTF did you give a product the same name as Brewer's theorem?).

There have been some attempts to extract some of the UI5 controls so that they can be used with React/Angular but I can't see those ever being adopted. I've worked with UI5 development teams that struggle with even getting the basics of Git and love using that godawful WebIDE, so I have no hope for customers being dragged away from SAP solutions to anything vaguely "industry standard".

Sorry for the negativitiy, but after 20+ years of SAP paying my bills (and paying them well), I'm even more cynical than ever.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

It's the same today - S/4HANA is still accessible from the GUI and DIAG is still used. Web applications (which SAP is pushing customers towards) are freed from this, of course (they talk native http to the SAP application server).

Remember that back in the late 90s SAP had a native GUI that ran on Windows, OS/2 and Unix (Motif-based) and each had their own native controls (a native Windows listbox is implemented differently from a Motif one, for example). Developers would develop a UI in ABAP with platform-independent controls and that UI would be sent over the wire to the client as DIAG and the client would translate that into the native control and data, etc for the end user.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Agree 100%. The whole "management consulting" industry is rotten and all of the "Big 4/5" accounting firms suck. There are boutique consultancies that do excellent work but so many CIOs will go with Accenture et al. because of their name and perhaps because they perform their annual audits, etc.

BTW, on the last point - ABAP (SAP's proprietary language) has improved a lot over the years. Variable names are no longer so short (a vestige of the R/2 mainframe days) and the language has adopted a lot of features from Java and JavaScript. Not always the best (OOP like it's Java in 1998, woo!), but definitely a lot better than in the past.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Indeed, for a long time it seemed like SAP didn't "get" cloud. Having to sign long contracts and speak to an account executive to get access to their cloud platform (rebranded every few months, now "Business Technology Platform", BTP) was the way they did things. Contrast with Google, Amazon, etc.

I've not yet used S/4HANA Cloud (only the on-premise version), but it looks to me like it's just a hosted version of standard S/4HANA but with various restrictions on what you can customise etc. No real elasticity, cloud scaling, etc. SAP ERP has been multi-tenant since at least R/3 in 1992 (I never used R/2) so "Cloud ERP" smells to me like "we host it for you and call it cloud".

Yes, I am rather cynical at times.

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Implementing SAP in retail has its own challenges. The large number of products ("articles") sold, locations ("sites"), handling POS data etc.

My first ever SAP implementation was for a large retailer and the project was cancelled (they later implemented SAP ~10 years later after the product matured somewhat) and another project 8 years later was also cancelled. Only two SAP projects I've been involved in that have been cancelled and both were retail (and using IS-Retail, SAP's solution for retail industries).

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Indeed it is. Even when using other development tools (eg, ABAP in Eclipse or the third-party addons for VS Code), the code is still stored in the database and executed from there by the ABAP VM. There's no such thing as "offline development" with SAP ABAP, although people are working on it...

taway19920706 | 3 years ago | on: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

Not the OP, but my feeling is that you use standardised processes when they are not your core. For example, if you produce a widget using various raw materials, is the way you pay your staff delivering any competitive advantage? Or the MRP process you use to re-order engineering spares? Probably not - standardise those. Implement unique processes where they differentiate you from your competition. Standardise everything else.
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