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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.
...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.
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.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
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.
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.
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