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

To: treetopflier who wrote (2791)	11/17/1998
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3424

Excellent post ttf.... and you KNOW it pains me to say that. <gg> As a side point, on this issue of service and support. Imo, Oracle has the best service and support - why? Because anybody can call there. The difference between gold, silver and bronze is simply coverage span, 24x7 etc. This in contrast to say, Sybase support (the past I know) who only accepted calls from 2 designated contact personnel from each site. When you open the floodgates and let everybody call support in a site, it dramatically improves uptime in a hurry at a departmental level. If your resources as a vendor are stretched doing this, then add a "screener" or privide a set of how-to whitepapers etc. and as a last resort make people wait on hold. But never, never restrict access to a support organization to only a select few. JMO. Anybody know what Saps policy is? Michelle

To: treetopflier who wrote (2791)	11/17/1998 9:12:00 PM
From: riposte	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3424

Response to treetopflier... ttf - Well, you really got my SAP friend fired up. Here's what they've asked me to post for them in reply to www3.techstocks.com Understand, I'm just the messenger... Steve Yes, let's put three paragraphs from an SAP competitive whitepaper that is 2 years old on this thread and tout how SAP outperforms PSFT. The paper is dated Oct 10, 1998. PSFT using Tuxedo runs just fine on slow to medium speed wide area network links. My current shop is doing just that. First, undo this confusion I have about what you just said above in conjunction with your Oct 28 post Oh, and Wednesday I am at a full day briefing on the new release of Peoplesoft HR.We are really excited about their Tuxedo product. We've had such performance problems in the field offices with their current release. www3.techstocks.com If I understand these postings correctly you are telling us your tuxedo/Peo. system now has a 2 week good performance track record. TWO WEEKS <grin>. Hardly concrete evidence to me and I'm sure many others. At any rate, any system will run just fine until you start loading it up. Bottom line is, R/3 is more processing efficient than any of its competitors. Since P's new system is kluged from their 2-tier, I suspect they still have about 2 years more worth of tinkering until benchmarks start to compete with R/3's. For what it is worth, SAP is still making very minor tweaks in this area. (By the way, SAP benchmarks are published publicly through competing hardware vendors. You will not see P do this until their results start coming close to the R/3 results. BTW SAP can "tout" performance because of this, P cannot). Yes two tier client/server doesn't work over a WAN. Not Peoplesofts, not Oracles, not SAPs - unless you are referring to character mode or some screen scraping facsimilie of a GUI client that SAP may be calling client server. Or are you talking about 3270? Yes, 50 users in 3270 character mode would probably run quite well on a 64KB line. From what you wrote here I can see you are not a technical person. R/3 two-tiered DOES operate over WAN with no more degradation on the front end then that of R/3s 3-tiered. R/3 has no character mode. Maybe you are referring to searating the app and db servers in ifferent regions connected via WAN??? If that is the case this has nothing to do with front end efficiency. Technically as a side note, R/3 will work this way but SAP does not recommend or support it. First, business wise, if you have a shop running 5 app servers all distributed in different parts of the country. You will need onsite support staff to support each region, all R/3 trained. On the other hand if all servers were sitting next to each other in the same shop they would be able to support the same system with 1/5 less IT staff. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what kind of corporate savings that would be. Second, from a technical standpoint, the WAN would be unneededly taxed. Also, the users High system Availability would be at greater risk. But enough, I ramble. Good luck to these companies. I haven't seen many SAP installations that didn't cost in excess of $10M. Many were over $100M. Unless a medium size company can drop in a vanilla SAP implementation they are in for a real shock. You have not seen many because of the overabundance of 100M contracts. What would you tell your sales people if you were in SAP shoes? Drop the 100M contracts and go for the 10M contracts??? Give us a break, please… Now FWIW, no R/3 installation is exactly the same. At the same time every business wants to tailor their applications just right way which is most efficient for them in the workplace. Mid market companies have these same characteristics. So when you insinuate P offers turnkey or vanilla applications to every business, no custom info popups, ...nothing. I don't believe that for one second. Bottom line is if there is a mod somewhere, it is not vanilla. Best P can do is offer a set of config pushbuttons to cover the majority of the variations. Easier than R/3 but definitely not vanilla. Duh. What slide in the SAP sales pitch did this come from again? Peoplesoft pitch, same slide. Oracle pitch, same slide. Even Baan and JD Edwards will tell you the same thing about their competitive positioning. Prove it. Define how a company gets 'ahead' in support and training. Overall service revenue in these areas? Quality of materials? Training participant feedback forms? Time to close problem tickets? Number of problems tickets logged per product? Get the picture. You are dealing with topics that are not generally quantified to the outside world in any form that would substantiate this statement. Makes for a good slide tho. Nice bail out response that can be used with any pro-related SAP field information. You got a point though it's all a I say/you say type of debate. I will say though for the benefit of others that SAP's structure is setup for global 24x7 support for hotline and Earlywatch. In addition there are the Goinglive, and OSS information services. With 5 years worth of customer data for thousands and thousands of systems, SAP knows how to handle every problem situation such that only 1 out 100 ever requires a special Walldorf firefighter consultant to step foot on customer premises. This is the way it is today and it is always getting better. In the past we had growing pains getting everybody adequately trained and still so to some extent. So please don't try digging up old bones. (Nice marketing coming from an SAP tech person dont you think? ;-) OK now it's your turn. In what way does P match these individual services. (Hotline and regular onsite consultants don't count). Peoplesoft entered the 'market' via the worlds best human resource application suite and it was not targeted at middle markets. They broadened their application suite and sold to their installed base. They were never a middle market vendor. They began as a specialty application vendor. So did SAP. They began as a specialty application vendor leading into the R/2 world. But their vision was wider back in the earlier days. This is what distinguishes these two companies from one another. Vision. This is why SAP is coined the Gorilla and P is a gorilla wanabe. It was all vision. If SAP is successful in the mid-market it is clear P will be another chimp. If not, both companies will always butt heads. That is, P will never uproot what SAP already has established. For me it clear, P has more to loose than SAP. Yes, SAP still has to prove it, and I don't believe they are going to be stonewalled in the way you are implying. Those that think so are just fooling themself. And their premier consulting partners aren't racing in their to their aid. You don't often have Peat or Price or Anderson involved in small firms this size. Those guys go where the money is. When the upper market starts drying up a little more they will be there in the mid-market like a pack of buzzards. You wait and see. BTW. You keep bringing up Oracle in your other posts. Consider this. Take away the SAP related licenses from Oracles DB product and you have one in trouble company. By the way before I end this I was looking back in the thread and I found another post of yours where you say: "overbearing, inflexible product infrastructure that will make it nearly impossible to tightly integrate a front office apps suite." What a laugh. Again, I claim you know absolutely nothing about SAP architecture and internals. So prove to the thread you do. Tell me why it is going to be so hard, and be specific. Remember that people will be looking for the answer to this question in your next response. Especially this answer.