SAP License Fees Also Due For Indirect Users, Court Rules (networkworld.com) 123
SAP's licensing fees "apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data," according to a Thursday ruling by a U.K. judge. Slashdot reader ahbond quotes Network World:
The consequences could be far-reaching for businesses that have integrated their customer-facing systems with an SAP database, potentially leaving them liable for license fees for every customer that accesses their online store. "If any SAP systems are being indirectly triggered, even if incidentally, and from anywhere in the world, then there are uncategorized and unpriced costs stacking up in the background," warned Robin Fry, a director at software licensing consultancy Cerno Professional Services, who has been following the case...
What's in dispute was whether the SAP PI license fee alone is sufficient to allow Diageo's sales staff and customers to access the SAP data store via the Salesforce apps, or whether, as SAP claims, those staff and customers had to be named as users and a corresponding license fee paid. On Thursday, the judge sided with SAP on that question.
What's in dispute was whether the SAP PI license fee alone is sufficient to allow Diageo's sales staff and customers to access the SAP data store via the Salesforce apps, or whether, as SAP claims, those staff and customers had to be named as users and a corresponding license fee paid. On Thursday, the judge sided with SAP on that question.
oracle all over again (Score:2)
Re:oracle all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
what could possibly go wrong?
I have talked to dozens of SAP customers, and I always ask them "Are you happy that you decided to go with SAP?". So far, this is that number that have answered affirmatively: 0.
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You simply need competent and experienced ABAP developers to make real use of it.
When you are stuck with the standard only and also only get the typical SAP consultants, then you are SOL.
I'm working at a larger hospital and we have quite a few more hospitals on our SAP system and it works really well, but took lots of development time. We of course added all sorts of proper solutions, that the SAP standard (IS-H, i.s.h.med) is simply not delivering. Especially i.s.h.med is literally shit.
Anonymous, because
Re:oracle all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, so long as you throw out all their code and use them as a kind of shitty application server, they can be alright- if you get good developers to write the app for you. Sounds like you should just skip the middleman and write your own application from scratch then.
Re:oracle all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, so long as you throw out all their code and use them as a kind of shitty application server, they can be alright- if you get good developers to write the app for you. Sounds like you should just skip the middleman and write your own application from scratch then.
This is true of all similar systems though (Remedy, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc..).
The execs get sold on it by sales people that show them a built out and customized suite, but all they pay for is the basic unmodified system. Then they refuse to put the budget into the management and configuration of the tool.
I've been in the business for 20 years now and I've yet to meet any user that is happy with such systems. When you dig into it the real reasons always come down to a poor deployment/implementation.
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No, it seems you have no idea what SAP actually is and what you get with R/3.
And you actually do not throw out all code, that would make no sense.
IS-H is primarily designed for billing, but hospitals like ours are of course not using it just for billig. Still there are tons of changes every year, also based on law changes, regular billing changes and so on. There is no way that you could do all of that by yourself even if you had a large development team behind you. And that part actually works well. It's a
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How many developers do you have? How much time?
While of course you wouldn't need to write all of it, I still think you're underestimating the effort by a teeny weeny order of magnitude or two.
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I always preferred Baan. It was good and well performing. You could write your own improvements. Then the heavy marketing by SAP came into play and that made corporate decision takers say, If it's SAP, my job is spared.
At least Baan supported (out of the box) 4 languages (English, French, Spanish and your_own_translated_version)
Now I know Baan became Infor. Its still a tremendous product, even with the change of ownership.
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Or do like some of do, we pull the data directly from SAP, stage the data over time, and feed it back to all the parts of the business to make magic happen. Common dimensions, broad source feeds from all the various on-prem or cloud hosted services, and visualization/report
services of several flavors to cater to multiple data use cases... Data warehouse FTW.
Whoot!!
Re: oracle all over again (Score:3, Interesting)
Based on my reading of this situation, what you're doing would be considered "indirect" as well. Just because you dump the data out, rearrange it, and present it in a different system doesn't mean the data didn't "originate" from SAP.
This is straight out of the Oracle "F*** your customers over" playbook.
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Based on my reading of this situation, what you're doing would be considered "indirect" as well. Just because you dump the data out, rearrange it, and present it in a different system doesn't mean the data didn't "originate" from SAP.
This is straight out of the Oracle "F*** your customers over" playbook.
I tend agree with your statements. Even in my place of employments situation, we extract from legacy systems via an SSIS ETL process and then use PI to extract out of SQL tables, eventually, that data gets fed back from the ECC solution to the BW solution and then extracted data from the BW solution to downstream BI solution. Even though that data originated from another system, the fact it was extracted from BW means a SAP user license for anyone touching that data.
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I have talked to dozens of SAP customers, and I always ask them "Are you happy that you decided to go with SAP?". So far, this is that number that have answered affirmatively: 0.
I'm not claiming to be an expert in this area, but having been a bit player in some large projects involving the likes of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Deloitte, KPMG etc I've never understood where the value in these big dollar solutions. An example is an Oracle project looking to cost >$10million for a suite of products and solutions I could get from newer, smaller, more dynamic vendors for half the price.
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Well, if you are operating in twenty different countries, SAP will keep your accounting rules adapted to the intricacies of each one, yearly as rules change in every contry. And then offer you a consolidated view of all your financials.
It's in fact the only solid reason I know for going SAP, but, as the decision makers are usually financial people, it works mightily.
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what could possibly go wrong?
I have talked to dozens of SAP customers, and I always ask them "Are you happy that you decided to go with SAP?". So far, this is that number that have answered affirmatively: 0.
As a user stuck in the middle of an SAP migration, I would agree. Our legacy system has 18 years of transaction history, and it can run database queries that would crash SAP that only has 5% of the transaction volume. SAP can't even do simple data transfers to your PC without crashing because they do everything in-memory.
After migrating less than 1/5 of our sites to SAP, we are having such awful performance issues that we are implementing SAP's only solution (called HANA), which just runs the entire sys
How "indirect" was the use? Was SF just a proxy? (Score:5, Interesting)
While my gut reaction is "this is outrageous!", I have been approached by several clients asking me to create systems/applications that would act solely as a proxy to allow them to skirt licensing costs. I want to believe that's what happened here but it's hard to say without actually seeing what the application did and how "indirect" it truly was. If a small piece of functionality was pulling reporting data from SAP that's one thing, if the primary purpose was to just to present data to users through a single license, that's another.
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Which just highlights that the problem is the licensing model.
The change of terms means that it's an indication of SAP either have become "too big", they have saturated the market and can't grow anymore or they are starting to fail. In any case they may need to downsize in order to keep the customers.
Also realize that many businesses that have been successful have tailor-made systems.
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Which just highlights that the problem is the licensing model.
Yes - that is what you get when you go for commercial software.
Open source is nice. No licencing fees, manufacturers don't meddle in how you use (or resell) the sw, no licence tracking overhead. Lower TCO, and the overall quality is better too. Finally, there are fewer ads involved!
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Which just highlights that the problem is the licensing model.
Yes - that is what you get when you go for commercial software.
Open source is nice. No licencing fees, manufacturers don't meddle in how you use (or resell) the sw, no licence tracking overhead. Lower TCO, and the overall quality is better too. Finally, there are fewer ads involved!
Not all commercial vendors have such painful licenses, but a lot do.
Out of curiosity, what OSS options are out there that offer the breadth of functionally that either SAP or Salesforce do? It's hard to use an OSS alternative when none exist.
Re:How "indirect" was the use? Was SF just a proxy (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not familiar with either SAP or Salesforce feature sets but if you are seriously considering them you should look at Odoo [odoo.com] first. You could use that, hire half a dozen full-time programmers to tweak it and still come out ahead. It is also more likely to be useful out of the box than SAP.
If that's not open-sourcey enough there is also Tryton [tryton.org] which was forked from an early version of Odoo. Not as many features, but some technical improvements. Odoo modules should be fairly easy to port if they have the right licence.
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None. Inventory management in not fun. Production scheduling is not fun. Order tracking is boriiiing. Accounting, yawneroonie.
Most open source developers would rather spend their time screwing up a desktop environment or inventing shit programming languages.
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You would not believe how creative both the writers of corporate service licences are in inventing reasons why there customers shall pay them more, and how creative the corporate users of such services are in inventing more or less plausible/legal ways to circumvent the license fees.
Just one example: Vendor writes into the license contract a higher monthly fee for "pushed" updates instead of "pulled" (requested) data. A company using that service
No idea what SAP is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No idea what SAP is... (Score:5, Informative)
They also have a director of Buddhist meditation [linkedin.com], which is kind of weird tbh.
Re: No idea what SAP is... (Score:3, Funny)
Actually it sounds a perfect fit to me. SAP is the embodiment of the Buddhist idea that all desire is suffering. Like the indifferent universe, trying to get its software to adapt to your wishes only leads to pain.
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SAP is the embodiment of the Buddhist idea that all desire is suffering. Like the indifferent universe, trying to get its software to adapt to your wishes only leads to pain
The environment created there is a perfect place to recognize and overcome suffering? Such a true point AC, such a true point.
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... They also have a director of Buddhist meditation [linkedin.com], which is kind of weird tbh.
Once you're sitting on that huge pile of money, it's best to look contemplative...
Swimming around in it like Scrooge McDuck is right out!
Unless you're sure no one is looking. [youtube.com]
Re:No idea what SAP is... (Score:4, Funny)
SAP = Scheiss Aufs Privatleben.
In this case, SAP = Send Another Payment.
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Shitty Assed Program
Simple answer. Dont use SAP. (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly their database and software is god awful crap. Why anyone uses it I'll never understand.
There are so many other proven alternatives that are built better and has a UI that was not built by raving lunatics...
Re:Simple answer. Dont use SAP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, once you've got it, I suspect getting away from it is HARD.
And they sell it to the C-suite, not the people who will have to run it or use it.
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This.
They sold that shit to Mobil Oil Corp (now defunct) as the "do-all front end to a backend."
It was tough to learn and wonky.
As a systems analyst for Mobil, I refused to have anything to do with it.
Those "upwardly mobile" promotion chasers went to work across the street for Kodak, who fired them later for being unskilled.
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Marketing, marketing and more marketing combined with slick sales persons.
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There are so many other proven alternatives that are built better and has a UI that was not built by raving lunatics...
Hah, I've never understood the SAP value proposition, maybe the backend is good, but UI is the worst piece of shit I've ever seen. I just don't get how it is possible for a top tier company to get it so wrong.
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Have you ever seen/used Oracle ERP? SAP is wonderful compared to Oracle.
I was at a place that rolled out a new Web application on Oracle. It looked like it was written in the 70's. The fonts were terrible, the forms and field data didn't line up, it didn't scale for different screen sizes, the menus made no sense and the search never found anything useful. And this was only few years ago for a public company with millions of customers. Fair enough if this was your teenage kid's first go an app and he did it for free, but these solutions cost millions of dollars, I simply don't
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Have you ever seen/used Oracle ERP? SAP is wonderful compared to Oracle.
Sawing off your own testicles with a blunt hacksaw is wonderful compared to Oracle.
Re:Simple answer. Dont use SAP. (Score:5, Insightful)
All ERP systems (like SAP) are sold the same way: people in suits who don't know much about the internal workings of the actual software sit in boardrooms with executives and show them powerpoint slides of the reports that their ERP system will provide them, and none of the executives worry about the fact that (a) the software is expensive to install and even more expensive to customize - with consultants bringing in up to $200 per hour sometimes, (b) you have to adapt your business processes to the ERP system, not the other way around, unless you want to spend even more $$$, (c) any customization you do make has a good chance of being broken when you upgrade to the new version, (d) the extra data entry work that has to be done to actually get real data into the system to generate those reports probably costs more than any savings you'll realize as a result of having all that data.
I maintain an in-house ERP system written in C# running on SQL server for a small business of about 150 employees, but we're growing fast. I only spend about half my time on the development and tweaking of this system, so the only thing it costs is two VMs and half my salary. (Note that this is separate from the accounting system). There's absolutely zero licensing costs. The software is tailored to the way we do business, not the other way around. It collects data directly from the diverse manufacturing machines on the plant floor through interfaces that I can write, control, and maintain, and it does this without any manual data entry on the part of the users. Its unit test coverage is over 90%, so we can push out changes and updates without fear of breaking existing features, and I can respond to new feature requests sometimes within hours or even minutes. It tracks employee time, project management, design, purchasing, production, inventory, shipping, maintenance and costing all in a single integrated place.
Companies buy off-the-shelf ERP systems so they don't have to manage people like me, but they really end up paying through the nose for it.
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Yes, but how would that scale? Mind you, this isn't an argument in favor of SAP, as I believe that you could redesign that into something that would scale, albeit it would be a bit less flexible. I'd want to use a different DB engine, possibly PostGreSQL. I don't like C#, but there's nothing really wrong with it, I just think that if you want to scale it you need to convert it from a single DB into a hierarchy, with each local entity being a complete sub-module analogous to your current system, but the o
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SAP cant scale worth shit, we recently added 4000 people in the call center and it took SAP 8 months to "scale" the stupid garbage pile they call software to handle it.
Then when we wanted to put in a system in the RMA database to track repair RMA data, the SAP experts said it was impossible, so one of the IT guys wrote the system we needed in PHP with a Open source SQL backend. he has a MITM box that will grab info from SAP and then spit it to the RMA server. when you do a query on the RMA page you get
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SAP was unable to deliver this. Because SAP is really shitty.
Why would they bother? They can apparently let you spend the money and effort developing it, and still charge you seat licenses when it's all done anyway. Sounds like a win-win for them.
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Companies buy off-the-shelf ERP systems so they don't have to manage people like me, but they really end up paying through the nose for it.
Actually it's mostly so they if you get hit by a bus or decide to quit or decide you got them trapped and can demand a 10x salary increase they can get by without you. Sadly there's a lot of well designed custom systems that'll be throw out for no other reason than being very custom and very specific to your needs. The theory is nice, you can use a generic solution and it's just configuration. In practice I've found that you often end up with big limitations and have to work around them. And that can actual
Single Point of Failure (Score:3)
Your system sounds cool. What happens if you get hit by a meteor on your way to work tomorrow?
That's probably why they're paying through the nose. I don't know jack shit about SAP and I work in the public sector but that part is likely the reason.
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I hear this all the time, and I'm not convinced. Companies buy stuff. They either sell it, or use it to make something and then they sell that. They either make it when somebody orders it, or they make it in advance based on forecasts and keep it until somebody buys it. They send invoices to customers, they get invoices from suppliers. The invoices can go before the goods, or after...
All that's there, in the standa
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Not buying it. Flaws like what?
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Why anyone uses it I'll never understand
Actually few people understand. The ones who understand are CEOs and deciders. SAP is a gigantic ERP that deals with almost anything. It's build on a solid architecture, has its own system, language and database, and is highly customizable (people do SAP customization for a living).
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How to price yourself out of existance (Score:3)
SAP, this is a nice way to price yourself out of existance.
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"Over my company's 45 year history, we've had total profits less than what we've pad to SAP which isn't including the about $75 million we spent in configuration."
Honestly, that doesn't sound like SAP's fault. That sounds like you've been (barely) running a crappy business for 45 years.
Or laundering money for the Mob.
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Executive summary (Score:5, Informative)
Sales Force is making money using SAP data, and SAP wants a piece of that action - so they're wrangling in court over the interpretation of SAP's licensing terms.
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Silly human: You expect their executives to think about the long term? Those guys are in it for the bonus this year.
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I looked at this (salesforce SAP, there's not much interpretation needed IIRC, it was really obvious. Sounds like someone in Diago didn't do their due diligence and took a punt at saving themselves a lot of money, via a court case, which would also cost them a chunck of change.
Apply that to the web (Score:1)
Imagine applying that to a web-server: Being able to charge every reader for every page downloaded. On the good side, as a paying user, customers now have a voice in the use and sharing of their data. So maybe Facebook and friends won't be rushing to charge money from their herd of sheeple.
Managed SAP R/3 since 1993... (Score:5, Informative)
and there's no way SAP will allow someone to see data from their ERP system without paying for it. We've invested over $200 million in licensing fees and configuration. That isn't counting the money we've lost since it doesn't fit into our company's business model very well. After an audit in 1996 when we exposed data via a web site that I wrote in C in 1996 (which was like digging a hole to China with a spoon), we've paid user fees for customers since they have access to a small portion of their ERP data. It's great that we have a "single source of truth" with SAP and in the previous ten years before 1993 when we didn't use SAP things were just a disaster, but it's not worth the cost. Over my company's 45 year history, we've had total profits less than what we've pad to SAP which isn't including the about $75 million we spend in configuration.
According to:
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/mx/Documents/human-capital/01_ERP_Top10_Challenges.pdf [deloitte.com]
" 55% to 75% of all ERP projects fail to meet their objectives." I don't see how that number is not larger considering the difficulty in getting SAP to do even basic stuff and the cost of customization. From talking to friends that use SAP, I would guess the failure number would be well over 90%.
Re: Managed SAP R/3 since 1993... (Score:2, Insightful)
The textile company I work for is almost 120 years old SAP has made more from us than we've made total in profits over that more than one hundred years. It sucks getting a company-wide paycut to pay SAP.
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The textile company I work for is almost 120 years old SAP has made more from us than we've made total in profits over that more than one hundred years. It sucks getting a company-wide paycut to pay SAP.
Standard MO; SAP is so expensive to implement with a successful failure as an end result. Been through it twice in two companies; SAP basically expects you to adopt your businesses processes to fit their model, else you spend lots of time re-implementing their processes as custom processes (where you can, which means lots of ABAP...). I've been the guy that writes middle ware in the Microsoft stack to integrate or extract data to other "friendly" systems (also having written those other systems at times). X
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Without looking it up, I knew all of those except the last one. Actually, just remembered that too.
Protip: if the end users are seeing them, you're doing it wrong.
If you're a programmer would you rather type them or something like documentSalesDocumentOrderTypeWhichIsTheTypeOfTheOrder?
Re:Managed SAP R/3 since 1993... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real problem with ERP systems is that they're so extensive they're almost like fully modeled business plans, but they kind of suffer from the "no one is average" problem where if something is designed to meet an average, it actually fits nobody.
So you end up with this complex system that doesn't actually fit your existing business process, requiring either gobs of customization to match your process and specific business, or change your business processes to match the intricacies of the software.
My guess is that once they realize this, they do both, customize and change business processes and end up doing damage to the business, at best increased expenses and short-term business disruption, or at worst, shrink the business and be saddled with expensive software that can't be shed.
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We have an industry-specific project-ERP system that costs about 0.5% of our annual revenue that, while under-utilized and poorly rolled out, does at least beat using QuickBooks for most things. There are some things it can't do, many things it can't do easily, and a number of things that are poorly presented and force you into exporting data to a spreadsheet for effective workflow. But, incrementally the value
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So do you think any ERP systems can work (defined as providing a positive return on investment)?
My guess is the success of ERP systems is probably somewhat inversely proportional to the complexity of the system. The less complex the system, the easier it and the existing business processes can be combined, the easier it will be for management to understand and use the tools and metrics and so on, and the lower the general costs are and the more likely that the technical requirements will be met without cutting corners that compromise functionality.
And there's probably a bunch of complex site-specifi
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One man's complexity is another man's flexibility. Why are there currency fields everywhere, don't they know it's always in dollars?
What is SAP? (Score:1)
What is SAP?
Simple fix, and job creation. (Score:2)
For a Sad SAP Story, Check out Target Canada (Score:3, Informative)
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So the question on Reddit the Other day, of how do I scale Active Directory to cover the 26 million people in Australia and New Zealand, needs to be: How do I scale SAP licensing to 26 million?
Skipping the basics... (Score:1)
SAP is a virus (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:2)
Time to make sure anyone I knows dumps SAP stock as it only has one direction to go.
Here's the ruling (Score:2)
Ruling [bailii.org]