In the course of this book, as in many articles and blog posts over the years, I have taken exception to several of SAP’s decisions and actions. In the 1990’s, I felt that there was way too much unmerited chest-thumping. SAP was making great strides in the marketplace but the R/3 software was not nearly as functionally mature as was being touted. Later, I was disappointed in a number of SAP initiatives in the small and mid-sized market and a continual insistence that more software was the answer to any problems their clients faced. More recently, I have become concerned that a number of SAP initiatives are such as Duet and Business ByDesign have distracted the company from the necessary path of improving the client experience.
Despite these criticisms, there have been two points in my career in which I chose to work in the fields of SAP. First, after a ten year run as a “generic” consultant running design build run teams for integrated applications, I felt compelled in 1995 to choose a vendor as generic consulting was being replaced by burgeoning applications software firms. Through the summer of 1995, I looked closely at ‘the big three’: SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. PeopleSoft sounded cool but appeared to be a provider of HR, Payroll, and some financials as opposed to being a full-scale ERP firm. Scratch PeopleSoft.
I chose SAP over Oracle for three key reasons: 1) former colleagues advised that SAP would fit me like a glove and 2) I noted that SAP had a much higher market profile than Oracle and 3) that Oracle was first and foremost a technology firm and its applications software business was second citizen in the realm. There followed six years in which I worked as an SAP consultant, concentrating not on how SAP worked but on what it could do for business.
The second time I chose SAP was in 2007 following a six-year stint as an industry analyst during which time I had considerable contact with all the major software vendors and large systems integrators. Given that exposure, I could have worked under the Oracle umbrella but I was not at all tempted in that direction. It was bad enough that Oracle had muddied the market waters with an insane acquisitions run (J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and a host of others) that turned it into a K-Mart of applications. Worse, I had observed an alarming revolving door in Oracle’s middle management, a cutthroat sales environment, antagonistic analyst relations, and a company-wide cavalier attitude regarding its clients. All of this was in stark contrast to SAP’s relative management stability and sincere attention to its clientele. While they have never taken criticism lightly, they do not shoot the authors of such criticism. In fact, they engage their critics, myself included, sometimes to defuse the criticism and sometimes as a way of listening.
In recent years, analysts and SAP competitors have tried to give the impression that SAP is so yesterday as software as a service (SaaS), the cloud, and SOA are seen as the pivot points to the future. Infor, which acquired more than 31 separate companies, is now marketing on a theme that “big ERP is over”, clearing pointing to SAP. Clearly, I disagree with analysts and with Infor.
I cannot imagine a firm with 5,000 or more active users putting their data out to a cloud. I cannot imagine a firm with 5,000 or more users accepting that they have no way to change their applications software functions.
Nor can I imagine a firm that is already using SAP and, beyond implementation costs, has millions upon millions sunk through deployment to simply shrug and move to something else. In fact, I haven’t seen it happen in my fifteen years around SAP.
SAP is the house I live in because the software works and I don’t have to know all that much about the technology to help clients move ahead. The functional span of SAP is unparalleled, not only across business functions but across discrete industries. Best business practices are truly best business practices. Upper management is stable, relatively harmonious, and nearly always open to discussion. SAP is no longer the hot new thing it was back in 1995; it is now a mature business with a rich eco-system and a vast number of satisfied clients from whom I continually learn new best practices. While I will continue to insist upon evolution (my goal is for SAP to become a business solutions firm and not an applications software vendor), I will not be changing residence.