SAP: Trying a Little Too Hard
November 2, 2008
SAP, home of the TREX search system, seems to be trying almost too hard to convince me that the company is humming like a top. In CXO, a publication which ran one of my articles a year or so ago, published here “SAP Helps Weather Economic Storm” by the CXO Staff. The article is short but it hits on themes that, I presume, resonate with beleaguered corporate types who face unprecedented credit challenges and a generally lousy economic climate. SAP is a company with middleware. Increasingly, this middleware runs on Microsoft servers. Microsoft at one time wanted to buy SAP because its midddleware commands multi million price tags and requires considerable hands on configuration, tuning, and customization. Like Baan and other enterprise wide umbrella solutions, SAP is a beast with quite a few moving parts. In fact, in one SAP installation, I recall hearing, “It was easier for us to change our processes to fit what SAP had than try to modify SAP to fit out methods.”
The CXO article makes these points:
- Real time tools to manage in today’s financial climate
- Special incentives are available
- Easy deployment
- Business intelligence available
What is interesting about this write up is that it is almost a brochure. There’s no mention of search; that is, finding what you need in the files and the SAP generated and distributed meta data that makes the SAP integration of information possible. There’s no hint that the the cost and deployment time have changed significantly. Nope. In my opinion, SAP is struggling. The IBM magic that juiced the company when it was founded is gone. The interest Microsoft showed in the company seems to be on the back burner.
The emergence of cloud computing, SharePoint, and enterprise publishing systems make the SAP solution seem out of step with the times. SAP may be the harbinger of change in enterprise applications that integrate disparate systems and data. And what about search? CXO has shifted search to business intelligence. That’s a nice touch as well but I still have to locate the purchase order, the manufacturing order, and the memo about the change to the order.
Can SAP adapt? Unlike the CXO Staff, I am skeptical. Oh, the “X” means any type of chief officer; for example, chief technical officer, chief financial officer, chief strategy officer. A bit of algebra never hurts.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2008
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