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.
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.