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How Elon Musk Approaches IT At Tesla
onehitwonder writes "In short, they build it themselves. When Tesla Motors needed to improve the back-end software that runs its business, CEO Elon Musk decided not to upgrade the company's SAP system. Instead, he told his CIO, Jay Vijayan, to have the IT organization build a new back-end system, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company's team of 25 software engineers developed the new system in about four months, and it provided the company with speed and agility at a time when it was experiencing costly delivery delays on its all-electric Model S."
Did you see where it only took 4 months? I haven't seen an SAP **upgrade** that went that fast, much less a deployment.
Of course, the reason for that isn't the (complete) ineptitude of people at SAP, or the superstar statusing of the engineers at Tesla.
Its easy to build a one-off solution that works for what a company needs on day one, do it quickly and be successful. Its vastly harder to build a one-off solution that still works for what the company needs done ten years down the line. And damn near impossible to build a one-off solution that just magically has equivalent success and value to other companies just by open sourcing it.
SAP upgrades can easily take that long, but SAP can easily run organizations an order of magnitude bigger, and two orders of magnitude more complicated than Tesla.
IMO, the key thing people should get from this is the importance of making sure you buy what you actually need. If Tesla could replace their SAP system in four months with 25 engineers, odds are pretty high they had overpurchased when they went with SAP to begin with.
Maybe they exist, but have you ever seen a company that actually could deploy or upgrade SAP faster than building something in house?
Yep a guy who built his first tech company at 24 got lucky
what does a founder of paypal know about large scale software projects compared to arm chair CIO on slashdot
I like how they describe SAPs customers as an industry (automobiles) which struggles, and a specifc company (HP) which outright sucks. If correlation was causation I'd say buying SAP is how you destroy a company.