Why did AWS, a group probably fairly technical savy and a direct competitor to its vendor, take so long [1] to migrate from Oracle?
Why does Google, as of today, have job openings for SAP in its Rev Rec division [2], and more widely in areas touching [3] “ SAP ERP domains (e.g. Finance, Revenue/Cost Management, Billing, Materials Management, Sourcing, Procurement and/or Inventory Management)”?
Granted you could say, and I believe in one of the many google “corporate biography” books Eric Schmidt allegedly worked through this same problem: hey is an ERP a product for us? A core competency? Should we build it? [Seems HN discussed this in 2021 already, 4]
Conversely, given the wide ranging scope of random things Google has built and how naively simple accounting and something like a fixed asset ledger looks at first glance…why did they never do it? Surely not because building 7 conflicting chat tools was a priority.
My guess (as a non developer) would be it’s crazy hard to build SAP. From personal experience even QB Online has a daunting level of “backwards compatible” complexity [5] in its data scheme even coming from an accounting background. The API keeps versioning up incrementally and you’ll find gems like “XYZ local French Tax” and other accumulated baggage. As an anecdote, using arguably a knowledgeable vendor, as of a year ago it wasn’t possible to populate a full simple profit and loss statement via Fivetrans ETL tool [6], even though they did a phenomenal job in mapping out the ERD compared to anything else that existed imho [7]. CDATA let you run SQL queries, but the complexity of scripting some of the reports was much more fragile. The community even built a DBT layer [8] and given how cumbersome it was to generate even just the “Revenue” line on the P&L out of a simple non-enterprise tool like QBO, SAP seems 1000x harder.
That’s probably why everything in-market, post-sales cycle is garbage. But hey, someone in a dorm room might be working on replacing SAP right now :)
Note: this excludes versioning, which I believe Workday does every six months, which is also a bunch of work twice a year.
Why did AWS, a group probably fairly technical savy and a direct competitor to its vendor, take so long [1] to migrate from Oracle?
Why does Google, as of today, have job openings for SAP in its Rev Rec division [2], and more widely in areas touching [3] “ SAP ERP domains (e.g. Finance, Revenue/Cost Management, Billing, Materials Management, Sourcing, Procurement and/or Inventory Management)”?
Granted you could say, and I believe in one of the many google “corporate biography” books Eric Schmidt allegedly worked through this same problem: hey is an ERP a product for us? A core competency? Should we build it? [Seems HN discussed this in 2021 already, 4]
Conversely, given the wide ranging scope of random things Google has built and how naively simple accounting and something like a fixed asset ledger looks at first glance…why did they never do it? Surely not because building 7 conflicting chat tools was a priority.
My guess (as a non developer) would be it’s crazy hard to build SAP. From personal experience even QB Online has a daunting level of “backwards compatible” complexity [5] in its data scheme even coming from an accounting background. The API keeps versioning up incrementally and you’ll find gems like “XYZ local French Tax” and other accumulated baggage. As an anecdote, using arguably a knowledgeable vendor, as of a year ago it wasn’t possible to populate a full simple profit and loss statement via Fivetrans ETL tool [6], even though they did a phenomenal job in mapping out the ERD compared to anything else that existed imho [7]. CDATA let you run SQL queries, but the complexity of scripting some of the reports was much more fragile. The community even built a DBT layer [8] and given how cumbersome it was to generate even just the “Revenue” line on the P&L out of a simple non-enterprise tool like QBO, SAP seems 1000x harder.
That’s probably why everything in-market, post-sales cycle is garbage. But hey, someone in a dorm room might be working on replacing SAP right now :)
Note: this excludes versioning, which I believe Workday does every six months, which is also a bunch of work twice a year.
1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
2. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/142858723165905606-r...
3. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/118792275728704198-s...
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706991
5.(imprecise but good starting point) https://developer.intuit.com/app/developer/qbo/docs/api/acco...
6. https://fivetran.com/docs/applications/quickbooks
7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/d/1u0dnyq5L_rcEgR2_...
8. https://fivetran.com/docs/transformations/dbt/data-models/qu...