[brendino]

SAP's lack of openness is a huge problem, and will continue to hinder its development. Not only does the license cost millions of dollars, but then the enterprise that purchases it has to hire dozens to hundreds of expensive consultants to actually implement the behemoth. And if the company wants to actually understand how to use the system, they need to invest in expensive training sessions because any sort of public documentation (or documentation shipped with the system) is far too vague to actually provide usefulness.

I tend to think that the lack of openness is done on purpose - that is, SAP depends on its consulting partners to help sell its software, so they need an incentive to sell it (not to mention, SAP has a consultancy itself).

SAP has tried to evolve recently with new developments like HANA (mentioned in the article) and MII (tool used to connect manufacturing systems and provide real-time KPI dashboards), but without a more-open ecosystem that enables learning and innovation, it will continue to stagnate as modern technology overtakes it.

The biggest hindrance preventing companies from ditching SAP for a modern system is the fact that SAP is so complex and can handle so many business scenarios. Although it stands behind the curve in terms of technological innovation, it has decades of business specific functionality built into the system. That's the main reason, in my opinion, for why enterprises haven't jumped ship.

[parfe]

>I tend to think that the lack of openness is done on purpose

I doubt it. From my experience it's from outsourcing development to too many different groups with no coordination.

I worked on interfacing with a BigName's Hour Time Tracking module which takes hours to 8 decimal places. I submit the first payroll and hear it is imported with no errors.

Two days latter I get a frantic email asking me to resubmit because the Payroll module only takes 6 decimal places and was throwing out all the submitted hours. The systems are so large the consultants themselves cannot possibly understand it, let alone provide proper documentation.

[brendino]

That's a good point - enterprise software is meant to be customized to a business, so maintaining a strong repository of documentation is difficult, if not impossible.

However, I've noticed that even some of the core functionality is pretty light on documentation as well (and it is typically written in German-English).

[ultrasaurus]

True, I've worked at OtherBigName, and whereas we did make as much money off training as software, the documentation mostly suffered because writing good and useful documentation of spaghetti code is really really hard.