SAP still struggling to convert ECC customers to S/4HANA, says Gartner New data from Gartner suggests that SAP is continuing to struggle to get users from its legacy ERP platform ECC onto the latest version: S/4HANA, launched in 2015. Despite seven years on the market, SAP S/4HANA has not been licensed by two-thirds (69 percent) of ERP Central Component (ECC) clients, according to data from …
We threw out Oracle and replaced it with S4/Hana.
Oracle worked, but was old and clunky and not easy to use. I'm pretty sure they threw some sort of license audit at us too.
I suspect S4/Hana is pretty good, but the contractors who are doing the work for us are terrible which makes SAP look bad. The problem is that we are a massive American corporation and the drive is to send every process possible to countries with the cheapest labour, so we've got what we paid for.
It's very good but very expensive. The hardware requirements are eye-watering in comparison with the ECC, and that's before you factor in your labour costs for the conversion....!
If you've spent a bundle and got SAP ECC working and all your interfaces connected, and you're happy, as it's not a simple upgrade it's very hard to justify spending a shed load of time and money to upgrade. The Hana database it's built on is fantastically fast and highly optimised for the kind of tasks that SAP runs, so the performance of SAP on Hana is amazing compared with Oracle, Sequel or DB2. The new Fiori web interface is actually quite pretty and light years better than the old Webdynpro one, but it's not still complete, and it is radically different from the traditional GUI, plus some tasks still work best in the GUI, so it's still an incomplete solution at the moment.
The other big problem is that there just aren't enough good people with the skills for the conversion around to do the actual work. If you throw an army of low budget and low skilled people at it, you get a pretty but useless solution which is scaring plenty of people. Many companies have also thrown away their own internal skillbase and aren't capable of doing the upgrade themselves.
SAP keep moving the goalposts on ECC, and if they don't get the conversion rate they need, they may be forced to move them again - which to be fair to them they don't want to do as it's costing them money to maintain two different products.
I didn't even know ASE was still around. I always did like that database; it was fun to bit-twiddle, and much more flexible than Microsoft's offering based on the earlier ASE releases. Times have changed, of course, and I'm sure ASE has been left to stagnate while SQL Server continued development, but I could also see them having rummaged through the ASE code base for the best bits of storage functionality for a database.
Typical of Theregister cribbing readers of just blaming the entire world, seeing malicious intent of tech vendors, bemoaning about every new tech being bad, and never focusing on solution. So, if everything is bad, what should we do, close down business and go home. Who will pay salaries to SAP employees, you SAP technical people, and others? How will we move ahead with newer tech or keep clinching to old stuff because of some random nostalgia? Please bring some solution on this forum or else shut up. Being cynical is easy, pulling down people who are doing something is easy, and giving gyaan showing how good/cool you is easy, but solving a problem, taking the world ahead is challenging. Do it, and you will know you cynical losers
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