SAP Netweaver

[Platypus]

And as for Platypus - Please don't promote such propaganda about our rates. I think you meant 900 rupees a day.

Become a SAP certified migration consultant. Loadsa money

(wish I was one)

[Durbs]

The first rule of a .net club is that we never talk about .net clubs

I thought the first rule was that only food purchased within .net club may be eaten within .net club?

[milanbenes]

ooops

Milan.

[darmstadt]

I once did a SAP support project and it was a bit of an eye opener, atrocious. I supported the mainframe and DB2 backend and it was quite funny how they implemented it. Instead of creating a database and then putting related tablespaces and tables in it they treated each databse as the server equivalent so each database would have one tablespace and one table which means that some systems had over 40,000 databases in one DB2 susbsystem (and then I would have to clone it.) So there were 3 SAP adminstrators just doing point and click all day whereas there was just one z/OS person, me, supporting not only multiple operating systems and all the related software but also multiple DB2 subsystems spread across them. Basically goes to show how the whole distributed client world works, just throw bodies at it.

Reminds of many years ago when I was working at a pan-European organisation where we supported thousands (around 40) users with just 3-4 people and they decided to go distributed. A consultancy came in and provided some figures, i.e. 10 support people per 1000 users and relevant costs. I started laughing and was asked to leave the meeting after pointing out what the current set-up was. Distributed computing is pretty much like the NHS, more administration that the actual workers.

[milanbenes]

ooops

Milan.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

How on earth does SAP manage to sell so well - is it just marketing like BMW?

[milanbenes]

oooops

Milan.

[threaded]

for big big big companies, is there any other choice ?

If you want software to cover every part of your big big big enterprise from a to z

and

you do not want all the c r a p of trying to cobble together best of breed
(where the different vendors blame each other when stuff stops working)

and

you want one phone number when you have a problem....

then folks, there's only one choice....

Milan.

Nah, that doesn't wash. One sees many a client like one of mine whose SAP installation's only use is for time registration, and because of some money saving exercise now have no one left who knows how it was cobbled together, so all new starters are getting the same 'shift pattern', they're entering those times, even though they may be working different ones, and are keeping track of their flexi on a bit of paper...

So, why do these organisations buy and continue to use SAP?

[SofaKingdom]

then folks, there's only one choice....

Milan.

Sage? Peoplesoft? Microsoft Dynamics? Oracle?

[NotAllThere]

Who cares why big business use SAP? I'm only interested in the fact that they do, and it pays for my lifestyle very nicely.

But if you do care - here's the sales pitch: SAP covers: sales, purchasing, finance, material management, MRP, production planning, project management, plant maintenance, HR, messaging, SRM, CRM, data warehousing, treasury, accounting, leasing, manufacturing, batch management, company mergers, executive information... . It's configurable and extensible to a high degree, it's integrated and it's scaleable. It's been immensely successful, because it isn't limited to one market sector. While I can think of plenty of software that has any one of the above, or even a collection of them, and does it better, I can't think of anything that has the same scope. Though in recent years interoperability has improved. Many organisations uses Ariba for purchasing, in conjunction with SAP, for example.

btw - ABAP has (in its origins) elements in common with COBOL, but it isn't COBOL any more than Java is C.