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Technology Stocks : SAP A.G. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: albert123 who wrote (1638)	7/23/1998 7:43:00 AM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3424

>One of the secrets of SAP's success is that SAP concentrates on the products and keeps consultancy by SAP employees to a minimum, thus allowing many others also to earn money off of the SAP products. Excellent point! In fact, that, IMO, is one of ORCL's problems. Ellison has established a HUGE services revenue stream and is very selfish with it. You buy ORCL apps, you buy ORCL implementation services! SAPs services model creates a SAP culture in the world outside of SAP. It protects their margins by not diluting high product margins with low services margins. It accommodates their growth, even after they are the gorilla, by letting the market answer the demand for SAP consultants rather than sapping (sorry) the resources of SAP in finding and training consultants. Novell did this successfully for many years. MSFT does it now (and crushed Novell).

To: albert123 who wrote (1638)	7/23/1998 11:02:00 AM
From: MulhollandDrive	Respond to of 3424

Thanks Abraham, I was definitely mistaken, my assumption was that a portion of the new hire of the additional 5000 employees would be due to implementation processes. That's good news indeed. bp

To: albert123 who wrote (1638)	7/23/1998 8:42:00 PM
From: mauser96	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3424

I've heard that the army of outside consultants actually make more money in a typical SAP installation than SAP does. The advantage is that SAP has an enthusiastic army of consultant salesman for free. The only real question I have about SAP as a long term investment is that most of the large enterprises will have SAP before long, so what do they do for an encore? I doubt if upgrades can fuel the kind of growth we are accustomed to, but the hope is that they will be able to successfully attack the huge number of mid sized and smaller companies that need ERP.