SAP customers fancy licence payments 'holiday' SAP customers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the German giant’s software charges and want a payments “holiday”. A UK and Ireland SAP User Group poll found 95 per cent think the rules on SAP's licensing are out of control, with 67 per cent blaming SAP’s expanding product line. As the catalogue of …
SAP users would like to pay less. Now there's a revelation!
My experience is that they're happy to splurge the cash like an over-enthusiastic porn-star to get their unified 'enterprise view'. And I've had experience of defence procurement.
Have the dangers of product lock-in never occured to them?
"Just employ a few decent developers.. hell of a lot cheaper then paying for sap every year."
Trouble is they are like the A team, as a non IT business person I would have no idea where to look or how to judge. For example, much of our organisation is done via Google spreadsheets. It would be great to set up a single aggregated sheet pulling info from all the other sheets but apart from manually there's no way. I have no way to tell if it's possible and if so, where to get customisation help.
Reg Article in a few years time.....
Decent developers are hard to find and too expensive...
Developers lock in major problem and massive unpredictable cost for companies .....
And AC comments:
sod that.... just buy an off the shelf system ... hell of a lot cheaper then paying for developers
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What works for some, doesn't work for all. Thankfully as a company, you can choose which way to go.
Data network? Far too expensive and complicated. We'd love it to be cheaper or to have a 'payments holiday'
Legal counsel? Far too expensive and complicated...
'Insert business cost here'? Far too expensive and complicated...
Look at what people do, not what they say. If they stop buying SAP expect these problems to be fixed in a heartbeat.
Can I suggest that one of the reasons why SAP are so reluctant to publically reveal these things is that not everyone is paying the same price; and there would be a lot of very unhappy people when they realise that they are paying hundreds of dollars per user more than other businesses.
As for open source systems; they will often work for smaller businesses. However, once you start talking about multi site, multi country operations with 10s of thousands of employees, you are in a whole new area and many of those FOSS / FLOSS systems are just not up to the job.
Developing internally is not a bad option, but you have to have the right people that can identify the real requirements and then have skilled programmers that can do the job right. There are a lot of people out there that think they can do it; I know from experience, that there are an aweful lot who are nowhere near as good as they think they are.
When you buy SAP, you have committed a lot of money and resources to the project. That's why so many are reluctant to jump ship; they are scared that they will end up wasting more than they gain. SAP know this and that is why they will keep squeezing the customer's teats to get those last little drops.
All well and good: big corporate work is hard and should be somewhat expensive. When you choose an ERP platform you are really committing your entire business to a single vendor. Spending vast resources to roll your own solutions in areas that are available off the shelf is frequently a dumb move. No one disputes any of that.
But SAP is miles beyond other companies in terms of the number of products you have to keep track of, the types of licenses you have to manage, how much stuff costs, and how hard they are to deal with. Other rapacious monster corporations we deal with are as expensive or complex (SAS, Oracle and IBM for example) but SAP beats them all in most negative categories. And most of it is completely unnecessary: there are other companies who have useful license tracking, simple user models, usable support sites and an un-antagonistic sales force, and they seem to be making a lot of money. I don't mind writing the huge check if that's what the work costs, but the hassle of owning SAP stuff is a drag.
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