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SAP License Fees Also Due For Indirect Users, Court Rules (networkworld.com)
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.
what could possibly go wrong?
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.
...as the headline and summary do not explain at all, but it sounds like you have to be one to want to use it...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
SAP, this is a nice way to price yourself out of existance.
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.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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
" 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%.
What is SAP?
All you need to fix this, is put humans between the SAP system and the rest of the backend. A few mindless data-input jobs and a license for each of them is - by definition - going to be cheaper. Call it a "human license firewall" if you want.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The company I worked at implemented SAP, and had an army of folks writing customizations to make it fit the business. I'm not sure what happened first, completion of the SAP implementation or bankruptcy. This link tells the story of Target Canada's experience: http://www.canadianbusiness.co...
... Diageo announced today that they plan to migrate out of SAP within the next two years. Their CIO did not indicate which replacement solution had been chosen but said "We are always following the market trends and ensuring that our IT organisation remains cost effective.". ;)
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.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Marketing, marketing and more marketing combined with slick sales persons.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Fuck SAP and the judge they have in their pocket.
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.
If you don't spring for a per-processor license they use these same incidental usage schemes which is outrageous and universally poorly understood by customers. They do shit like this intentionally to be able to go after anyone (with money) they want.
The worse part of all is SAP is a piece of shit.
At least they've got that straight; a company name which directly and honestly describes each and everyone of their customers.
SAP = South African Prostitutes
Right?
WTF with the acronyms?
any one of you can guess what does FESS stand for?
FESS = Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery.
Made you feel dumb, right?
Have you ever seen/used Oracle ERP? SAP is wonderful compared to Oracle.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Really, its time to move onto another product. Sure, it will be painful and expensive, but in the long run, its worth it.
So freaking true.
My old company started a project to switch to JDE Edwards and both the front end and backend were complete trash. In the JDE DB, almost every single column in every single table is varchar... Then they have a freaking xref table that tells you what type the column ACTUALLY is...
I get needing to support multiple RDBMS, but it was the biggest, most expensive HACK software I've ever seen
Indeed, I have experienced the same with many other services.
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 asks me to implement a proxy service that will pull at an insanely high frequency on its input and provide real "push updates" on data changes on its output.
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!
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.
Looks like the higher ups at SAP, as with most top managerial types, skipped basic economics class to go snort coke off hookers or something. Because this just raises the cost for anyone doing business with them, but since SAP sets the cost to begin with at whatever they want it offers them nothing. They could've achieved the exact same effect by just charging more for their products to begin with, the end net product is the same. Either their customers will ditch them. or they'll just lower the price back down to what it once was, or they could've just charged more without losing customers to begin with. The only net winner here, as usual, is the lawyers who just charged exorbitant fees for fighting this case.
Copy"right" and these license agreements violate a basic tenant I hold dear. Government should not be utilized to achieve social or political objectives outside of laws where there is a victim for where an act of violence, coercion, theft, or fraud exist. The means [government and violence] of achieving charitable or social ends can not be justified. Driving without a license in and of itself has no victim. Dumping toxic pollutants into a river on the other hand does. Copy"right" does not. Making a copy of something doesn't deprive the owner of anything. Copy"right" is suppose to have a positive social objective of promoting the arts and sciences for the public good- but it's not the reality today. Copy"right" no longer has a short limited period. Works produced today will never be available in our lifetimes.
If you think similarly ask yourself this question: Do you really want to live in a freedom/liberty hostile tyrannical state? If you feel hopeless I'd encourage you to look into the Free State Project and Shire Society. There are thousands of people who have moved to New Hampshire for the purpose of forming a free society / state. Given a limited number of active migrants and participants to New Hampshire it opens the doors for significant changes- some of which are happening already despite there not even being 20,000 people who have moved yet (about 10% of the 20,000 signers to the Free State Project have moved). While the federal government passed a lot of bad laws the reality is the state governments have the most impact on our day to day lives [including imprisoning the most people] so migrating active liberty-minded participants to a low population state can have a dramatic change at the local and state levels. It also opens the door for "What can we do once we have a sizable community in New Hampshire?"... well, the possibilities could go from a free state to a free country... but you have to take baby steps to get there.
With SAP's crappy e-commerce engine - hybris - I pity any company where their CTOs had their pockets lined to get it in their shop. One would presume that the whole license structure would be all ironed out, b I got an e-commerce engine and all. But with this newly court approved revenue stream, I'd be crapping my pants if Hybris is in my shop.
I need you to explain that one. Salesforce does not use SAP. Salesforce is built on massive systems of databases and I won't tell you which DBs are used, but guarantee it's not SAP systems. SAP is a competitor in the CRM space. That said, Salesforce customers can and do use SAP but that's not direct or how Salesforce makes money (at least to my knowledge). Seems to me like SAP is attempting to charge Salesforce for holding customer data generated with SAP. That won't stand up in a US court and should never have stood in UK either. Posting AC as I have inside knowledge.
And if someone signs up the UK court system as an accessor of SAP? Then what?
I still remember the post from fuzzyfuzzyfungus on a SAP case a couple of years ago.
A 'sap' is a small blunt weapon, usually a leather sack of lead shot, used to incapacitate a target.
A 'SAP system' is a gargantuan and expensive piece of ERP software used to incapacitate a corporation.
(https://it.slashdot.org/story/15/05/08/0353244/top-cyber-attack-vectors-for-critical-sap-systems)
The reason it is used, is because it gives good overview data for the people on the top making the decisions.
If the user experience is awful for the regular users, that is not a priority.
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!
And when the feds come knocking about your home-grown open source solution, how do you plan on PROVING that you are Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA compliant?
Or maybe you find a fundamental bug in this open-source solution with no work-around, and the developers decide they're not going to fix it, even though it's a violation of the POSIX standard, and no other implementation fails to meet the standard...
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.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
And when the feds come knocking about your home-grown open source solution, how do you plan on PROVING that you are Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA compliant?
Meh, Trump will get rid of those soon enough, along with that Dodd-Frank atrocity.
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 overall system holding a summary of all its dependent nodes...and probably producing a different set of reports.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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 actually cost you a lot more time and effort in the long run than actually making a solution that works they way you want.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Our new corporate overlords made us replace JDE with SAP about a year ago. Total shitshow. We had to add headcount in every department that touches it and we're still less productive. All our Pajeet consultants are trash and if they can't Google a solution to a problem, the ticket will just sit open forever, regardless of the impact on recognizing revenue. I can't wait for our PwC auditors to come in and slag that pile of German crap for jeopardizing our SOX compliance.
SAP is sold as giving the executive control over the company. The software does not in any way hide that it gives the finger to everyone else.
that should be eliminated. Horrible software, insane prices, dreadful support.
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).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That's cool! We now know that SAP will be dead in a few years because no one will consider them for use in any new system and they will be rolling systems off of SAP to get away from stupid licensing. As a rule you don't want to do business with a company so stupid that they are actively trying to discourage customers.
Time to make sure anyone I knows dumps SAP stock as it only has one direction to go.
This has happened to DHS. They have finally admitted defeat. SAP will be paid to create a new custom system for public service transactions.
A complete waste of money.
After this ruling the australian government now may have to pay an even higher licence fee to cover mygov and the other online systems
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.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'm not familiar with either SAP or Salesforce feature sets but if you are seriously considering them you should look at Odoo 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 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.
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 get how it can be done so wrong.
I bet parent knows all about Node.js though
Great read.
The investigative team estimated information in the system was accurate about 30% of the time. In the U.S., it’s between 98% and 99%. (Accenture, which Target hired as a consultant on SAP, said in a statement: “Accenture completed a successful SAP implementation for Target in Canada. The project was reviewed independently and such review concluded that there is no Accenture connection with the issues you refer to.”).
lol
Ruling
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.
If you find a big in closed software the vendor is in no way shape or form going to always fix it.
Bugs get closed as won't fix all the fn time
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 the full history of the device from manufacture date, to ship date, to who, to all repairs and even Tech support calls on the device.
SAP was unable to deliver this. Because SAP is really shitty.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Doing a lot of Odoo here. It's a good do-everything business suite for small businesses. I'm not sure how big implementations it can handle. Odoo is open source -although it has limitations (Richard Stallman says it's "trapped" see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...). One of the clear advantages is flexibility to model the ERP to the actual business processes (not the other way around). There is even a possibility to sell the code via their market/app store or to share it via the Odoo Community Association. The company I work for as a team of 20+ Odoo experts. All busy. We do provide a range wide of training programs for and with Odoo as well. I'm exploring Odoo carefully for my wife's business, and it looks pretty good.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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 standard.
I think that 99% of the time when people say it doesn't support their business processes there's an implied "in exactly the same way we did it before, down to the tiniest detail including the colour of the post-it notes that you stick on Maisie's screen when there's a goods return."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
SAP's PI/XI (now known as PO or Process Orchestration) is an ETL layer between SAP and the rest of the world. I think the judge was wrong here. If he's right then everyone has to pony-up for license fees to Microsoft to use DOC, CSV, PDF, TSV and XML data files output from SQL Server Reporting Services ... how stupid would that be?
As a SAP developer, I tried both Odoo and Tryton because I like the philosophy behind it. I noticed neither have the maturity and customisability of SAP. Out of the box, it is a good, although antiquated product which is roughly based on procedural programming and is a pain to debug especially when idiots have put custom code in 'repairs' (modifications to the standard source code - which is by the way fully open), or by 'enhancements' (you can basically add or overwrite functionality in every method/subroutine/...), or by the 'user-exits'/'badis (business add-ins) which are places where SAP has foreseen so the client can add their own code. The coding is done in ABAP, most modules use the SAP GUI (dynpro), some webdynpro (abap generated web pages, no html editing possible) and nowadays also UI5, which is using the netweaver gateway component to communicate with the backend system through json and display the application inside the browser of your choosing.
They now have S4HANA, which can either run in the cloud, or on premise. On premise, you can still configure and build custom stuff and everything the way you want, not so much with the cloud version. This is also their way of saying bye bye to Oracle, their own in memory database that can 'perform up to 1000x faster than regular DBs' - marketing speech of course, just to push away their clients from Oracle, and getting more revenue from them with another SAP product.
If companies would change their organization to follow what is possible inside standard SAP, they wouldn't need to pay much more than their licensing cost and some maintenance. The main issue is that they buy it because they see all these features, and after starting to use them they realise it is not exactly user friendly, and they eventually have developers make things around it that make it cost a lot to maintain.
There is a license report which checks whatever features have been used, and if you have that one system where you tried/used all modules (called installation), and you decide to quit using one of the modules at one point, there is no way to reduce your license cost, you still have to pay for that module.
That being said, the only real viable alternative for companies like this seems to be microsoft dynamics (navision) because of similar extensibility features. Can't say much more about it because I don't know the product as well as I do SAP.
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?
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
produce the "Oracle Applications Suite", and a worse pile of shit I have yet to see since. ...
implementing that heap of shit was so painful: undocumented, full of basic coding errors, and sometimes just plain "wrong"
i wrote financial apps from scratch in the 90s, that are STILL running strong
but worldwide, corporate fuckwits refuse to hire staff, it screws up their magical imaginary numbers, and prefer to "outsource" core company activities ...
cleaning, IT mgmt, finance - it may NOT be what you sell over the counter in the end, but these functions are CORE to EVERY company
don't believe the hype
challenge "authority" - they're usually full of shit
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Not quite right... it's that businesses keep changing their mind about how to do things, and those changes are actually often for good reasons. Often they discover there's a flaw in the way they're doing it, and maybe even a flaw in the way the whole industry is doing it, and they need to change. Our system allows the flexibility of change, which means the flexibility to improve. An off-the-shelf system discourages change, which also discourages improvement.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Not buying it. Flaws like what?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."