SAP Talk

“Anticipating Change: Secrets Behind the SAP Empire” (Amazon.com link) - this book aims to cover the business history and future vision of SAP through conversations among Hasso Plattner (the co-founder) and three distinguished practitioners and scholars namely Dr. Scheer, Dr. Wendt and Mr. Morrow.

I read the year 2000 version of the book and what strikes me is the relevance of the observations made by Dr. Plattner about the software industry. Also impressive to me is his background as a ‘nuts-and-bolts’ guy (he is an accomplished software systems technologist – he worked on development and implementation of financial accounting package of SAP in its early days and later directed and managed the R&D of SAP systems) who could successfully build and manage a huge global business. This reaffirms my belief that you can’t be a good coach unless you are a good player.

Apart from describing the turning points in SAP’s history (and also Dr. Plattner’s professional career), the book includes some very interesting observations made by him. Below are a few:

Impact of Recession on Software Industry – Software OEMs

At this time [in 2000], everything is being developed in parallel direct to the customer. Very few software publishers are concentrating on defining it as their business objective to build components that will then be used by other software producers. With the next recession a lot more of these software companies will end up in a crisis situation of competition, so they will have to consider whether they really need their own sales or it should be an engineering type sales for those who reuse their components. Automobile industry is a good example of this evolution.

Inversely Proportional Relationship between User Simplicity and Engineer Complexity

A tendency in a technical field is that when you want to make it simpler for the customer or actual user, the complexity of the implementation increases for an engineer. [For example] With an old car you had to double-clutch to shift gears and the transmission design was very simple for the engineer. Today, you drive with automatic transmission, the driver has it much simpler - but for the engineer it has become many times more complicated to build an automatic transmission.

Applications –Going Beyond One System

An application no longer moves from the user over several stages to only one data source (as in the N-Tier architecture), but rather it moves in several directions simultaneously. It accesses various data sources. Today we are building applications that relate to execution by various data banks and by various service providers. For example, planning for an event where services of airlines, hotels, rental cars and service personnel need to be claimed.

Global is Big

If an enterprise will really be active on a global basis, it just has to be big. A small global enterprise is a contradiction in itself. The actual resources that give an enterprise strengths are access to market, sales, access to knowledge and engineering.

The mid-size businesses have a tendency to be swallowed up. The idea of being quick and nimble applies only for a start-up phase when the intended purpose of the enterprise is being explored and sought. After that, the growth laws apply very soon and they shift notably in the direction of globalization.

On Japanese Version of SAP

We got pressure from our [multinational] customers in USA and Germany to export our software to Japan. We invested for three years to build a full-blown, two digit, double-byte character version of the system, and every single word is Japanese – all documentation, all screens. [Yet,] All the testing was done in German and English. We hired Japanese people to do the translation and to retest the system. [Having a Japanese version] was a big selling point to all the high tech companies on the West Coast because they have ties into Japan. We got HP, Apple, Digital, Compaq, Intel and finally Microsoft as our customers. Today (in year 2000), Japan is our third largest market [after USA and Germany].

We expanded the internal system to handle double bytes. Due to this, one system can handle not only Japanese but also Chinese, Korean and all other languages that require a double-byte system.

Permalink, (0) comments

Post a Comment