SAP WTF license fee

Yeah I saw this on Slashdot a few days ago

For Diageo, that's a huge bill -- on a par with the total amount it paid SAP for all services between May 2004 and November 2015, which the parties put at between £50 million and £61 million.
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It's a bit sickening when you have a company paying someone like SAP, a multi billion dollar global enterprise, over £50 million for software, only to have them suddenly turn around and decide you own as much again because end users are accessing SAP data through 3rd party software. They're basically the Oracle of Europe; Their entire business is basically software licensing and they will ferociously protect their licensing income.

Their case did have merit of course which is why they won. It seems SAP PI is designed to allow SAP to integrate with additional business software, including legacy SAP systems, but any access via that interface should be from licensed users. The Salesforce software was using that interface but allowing random end users/customers to pull information.

While I personally find this sort of software and the licensing costs for it ridiculous (probably partly because I've never worked in enterprise), I can't believe that SAP has no way for customers to pull information without every single customer needing a SAP license. I wonder if there's some SAP interface/api for this sort of stuff, probably stupidly expensive in itself, that people are trying to avoid by using 3rd party software and SAP PI, which is what has got SAP riled up?
 
SAP, Oracle, Microsoft (SQL Server) - all have a "named user" license type. And, at different times their customers have been bitten because they didn't read or understand the license terms correctly.
Perhaps a few customers even thought that they could "avoid" the license cost by providing access to the data via web, but it is hard to find any evidence, because cases like this most of the time end up with a confidential settlement / agreement between the vendor and the customer in question.

Of course a multi billion dollar company which gets a large part of its revenue from licensing will protect that "milk cow" for as long as possible. Why is this a surprise to people?
And remember this; if you sell software licenses you wont grow into a multi billion company if you allow your customers to get the licenses for free.

Here comes the fun part; these vendors change (ok, "update" is the term they use) their license terms every year, or every six months. So the customers need to have a license manager or two in-house, or buy license management as a service. :)
Note: these three are only examples. All proprietary software vendors do this.
 
The company I work for uses SAP. Personally I wouldn't use it because I find the login box depressing, and on top of that we have to share licenses because it's just crazy expensive, but I think the boss just likes to say he uses SAP because it makes him look better in the face of coworkers.

I wanted to code an example database for them to see, but my partner decided to foff, so I was left alone with no one to write it with, and it never happened.

It's a fairly big software, but IMO it's nothing you can't duplicate as a web application... I wanted my boss to say that he has a custom software, but that might make us more vulnerable to attacks, etc.

Anyway, we'll see what happens of that, but my question to people who know more about SAP than what I see of it (a bunch of tables à la FileMaker) is: what is it? Does it even do anything special?
 
usdmatt said:
Yeah I saw this on Slashdot a few days ago



It's a bit sickening when you have a company paying someone like SAP, a multi billion dollar global enterprise, over £50 million for software, only to have them suddenly turn around and decide you own as much again because end users are accessing SAP data through 3rd party software. They're basically the Oracle of Europe; Their entire business is basically software licensing and they will ferociously protect their licensing income.

Their case did have merit of course which is why they won. It seems SAP PI is designed to allow SAP to integrate with additional business software, including legacy SAP systems, but any access via that interface should be from licensed users. The Salesforce software was using that interface but allowing random end users/customers to pull information.

While I personally find this sort of software and the licensing costs for it ridiculous (probably partly because I've never worked in enterprise), I can't believe that SAP has no way for customers to pull information without every single customer needing a SAP license. I wonder if there's some SAP interface/api for this sort of stuff, probably stupidly expensive in itself, that people are trying to avoid by using 3rd party software and SAP PI, which is what has got SAP riled up?
Click to expand...

This is why I never and could never work for companies like this. I know these guys have all the bux and bring in all the talent from every corner of the globe but to what end? You work for them to build the tools that keep you in chains. It's such a huge up front costs to businesses and THEN the come around and and bend you over for a second go.
 
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