What would it take to "compete with the likes of SAP" in your view? I know almost nothing about ERP but a close friend is a SAP consultant and provides daily tales of super-Lovecraftian horrors so fantastic that it's hard to imagine why people use it. In fact most stories make me think "it would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more fun to implement that from scratch with Python and some open source tools".
"it would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more fun to implement that from scratch with Python and some open source tools"
I can honestly see why you might think that (I've had exactly the same thoughts before) - then you find out what a Tier-1 ERP does and can be quite a staggering collection of functionality a lot of which is absolutely required and not optional.
I am an SAP Consultant, and my .02 is that companies are so in love with their back office processes such as creating purchase orders and sales orders, that they want these things so highly customizable that it requires big package software.
Most SAP horror stories are from customers who don't realize their ability to process their Accounts Payable isn't a business core competency and is not bringing them competitive advantage.
If customers come around on this, THEN the days of SAP will be numbered.
A fellow SAP Consultant on HN...what a rarity! Hi!
Yes, basically this. Often what I found is that customers and vendors are extremely complex in the way they do business. "But we want to pay in 34 days, and if we pay on the 31st day at noon, we get a .005% discount relative to the current exchange rate" Try doing that in your self-made python system, that scales, has high-availability, disaster recovery, is available in 92 countries, and has an ecosystem of developers that come cheap from Asia.
What I actually find is that the people who are making the decision to purchase the software want to make sure they have the most feature rich system so when things do change, the "TCO" isn't impacted and they can fairly easily satisfy the changing requirement. I believe half of enterprise software is just deciding what the requirement is. (which is really no shocker to those is non-enterprise tech)
SAP ERP is pretty stable. That's what customers are paying for. Material management has been debugged for decades. Try to compete with that. A couple of python scripts seem like a nightmare to me.
Yes, the code is horrible and ABAP itself is a nightmare, but the software as product is very hard to tackle. The only way I can think of is a disruptive move of Big Business in general, ie. small networked entities instead of crusty old ones.
The issue with competing against SAP/Oracle is the kind of traction they have in the market already. Their contracts are long, and companies spend so much implementing the software that they're not excited to switch.
Also, as mentioned somewhere else in this thread, ERP software (Payroll, HR, Financials, etc) are all about the details. Payroll and Financials are very complicated, which results in companies only trusting the big players (SAP/Oracle)
Do companies like this ever get involved in lobbying? The complexity of the problem seems to be the core of their value proposition, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they subtly or overtly opposed simplifying reforms.
AFAIK, the answer is no. I honestly don't think they need to. The complexities are mostly a result of globalization (different governments policies, taxes, etc) and changing business models/products (material management, pricing schemes, etc)... all of this at scale.
PS - A note to the guys from OpenERP if they are reading. I would recommend doing something SAP does really well - touting it's customers success very publicly. It will massively raise your profile. Example: http://www.saphana.com/community/customer-stories
Note - I hope people understand I'm not criticizing them for their success, but rather for their statement that they are directly competing with SAP. They may be gaining market share in SME, but until you are doing this: http://www.workday.com/company/news/press_archive/kimberly_c... you are not really competing with SAP's bread and butter. And again, congrats to your success. I would be as chuffed as the author is here.
