Why would a business, a chief executive, be interested in something like that?
For the techies, this creates a whole new wave of innovation. They can build on a whole new platform. The chief executives are excited for a very simple reason. It changes the total cost-of-ownership equation. Integration has become the highest cost of IT in most of the companies you see today in any industry. If you can find the formula that actually reduced the cost of operation through preintegration of these layers, then you save a lot in operational costs that you can then invest back into innovation.
What kind of innovation?
A lot of people talked about the improvements in supply chain -- cutting four of five days out of a 16-day process. But you look at innovation in product definition and product design, and you may actually cut three to six months out of a 12-month cycle. The impact on a company is significantly bigger.
Where do you look to see that?
You look at innovation in mergers and acquisitions and post-merger integration, and if you have a better engine to integrate other companies, you may be the integrator versus being integrated into somebody else. These are new areas where we did things in the past on paper or spreadsheets and PowerPoints. We're moving now into a well-defined process that allows me to do it in a predictable and sustainable way across my businesses, across the world -- from the design to the launch of a product, from recruiting people to a postmortem on projects, from pre-merger deal rooms to a post-merger reorganisation. There are all these processes that we've never done before.
Do you think grid computing is legit or a marketing device?
Grid is extremely interesting for very specific business application needs. It doesn't live in a vacuum. It's the application vendors that make it interesting, more so than the technology vendors per se.
Is SAP developing new software around grid computing?
We've built a number of applications that actually are grid-enabled. Some customers right now are early adopters, and they're using our applications on the grid model.
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.