Do you think an Oracle merger with PeopleSoft would be anticompetitive?
I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest of PeopleSoft customers. For that matter, in most cases, I don't believe that any acquisition is done in the best interest of customers. One could argue that J.D. Edwards customers are not best served by the integration with PeopleSoft. Is it anticompetitive? I don't think they're doing it because they're trying to block competition. I think they're trying to do it because they're trying to compete with us and then it's hard to say if it's anticompetitive. But I think that question is reserved for the US Department of Justice and their evaluation of the case.
What kind of technology is SAP cooking up that's really going to wow people in the next five years?
There isn't one silver bullet. I think NetWeaver is our next foundation -- just like three-tier client server was our foundation 10 years ago. NetWeaver is our foundation for the next 10 years. You'll see a lot of players imitating us over these next 10 years, but I still believe that we will drive this.
What is NetWeaver, and how is it different from what came before it?
One of the things we're doing this time is we're bringing in our technology platform, which is sort of our secret sauce for how the applications are so robust and scalable. But we're opening up the platform so that people can build with it, including other players in the industry, such as integrators or developers. And we don't care if they're our partners or competitors -- they can use our platform and build on it.
SAP launched its NetWeaver initiative in January to make development and setup of business applications easier. Coming up on a year later, what does SAP have to show for it?
What we've shown for it is a lot of customers and what they've done with NetWeaver throughout the year. We've had case studies from Nokia and from Siemens, from Lufthansa. And we had small companies like Check Point. They've just completely changed the way they talk to their customers and distributors.
What is it adding to SAP's bottom line?
The benefit for us is that the customer is deploying SAP in a much more strategic way than it did before.
How so?
Think back five years ago. Customers viewed us as the ERP (enterprise resource planning) company, with all the other players around us telling everybody how we're going to die. And Siebel will win the battle, and i2 Technologies will win the battle, and PeopleSoft will win the battle, because we were the back-end business processes that were not interesting, and they would wind up doing the front-end, interesting processes. Well, five years have passed, and we're actually doing all the processes. And all the guys who predicted that we'd be dead are niche players right now.
Talkback
SAP is the slowest, most horrible POS i've seen out in the market. Let's be serious...the security is so tight you cannot integrate any of it in any current business application. Don't even tell me that SAP is good for reporting cause it is HORRIBLE. You cannot get a single GOOD printout. COnsultants are way too expensive, licensing is expensive, support is limited, the application is just HORRIBLE.
We put forth so much money into a piece of software that's probably worse than a basic access fe/be combo. Let's get real here...speak the facts..you may claim you're making software but for one you're charging an arm and a leg, and 2 your GUI sucks.
If this is the case what jon says,
why is SAP then the no. 1 company here,
jon? anybody?
Murt
Not so! Microsoft has run its business for years using SAP software, and I don't think they would accept a "POS" as you call it. In fact, considering how many business rules they are processing, the SAP applications are really amazingly fast and flexible. Just imagine adding that sort of auditability, security, scalability and internationalization to your own code....
Sounds to me like you're trying to write an "outside-in" program that leverages a SAP system. The simple fact is you can't do this until you've invested serious time and money in learning about their system. I'm currently advising on a PeopleSoft CRM implementation and the learning curve is just as steep.
It *is* worth the effort to learn SAP - I know that Microsoft built quite a few company-wide applications on top of their SAP system, because they used to demonstrate them at conferences and would invite SAP prospects to Redmond to talk about how happy they were. I worked for SAP for a while - after investing my own money in training - and I know they are 100% focused on producing exactly the features and performance that top companies demand.
Good luck with your project.