VOSibilities

Many readers will remember a couple of years ago when Justice Antonin Scalia was caught giving “an obscene gesture” to reporters after getting a question he didn’t like.

Today, a lot of SAP and Oracle customers have got to be feeling like they’ve just been given that very gesture by SAP and Oracle, who have both substantially raised prices (here and here).

I guess that with the very big increases in the cost of transporting those very heavy license keys and object code across the Internet, Oracle and SAP felt they were justified in nailing customers’ budgets to the wall yet again.

Here at Active Endpoints, we wonder how long corporate users will permit themselves to be abused like this. And from what we hear from customers on a daily basis, it’s not just the pricing that’s obscene, the products themselves are unusable.

Just this morning, one of our sales guys told me he’d just spoken to a customer that had completely failed with the obese, impenetrable middleware that had been inflicted on him and who had, in desperation, tried ActiveVOS. This customer said he’d succeed with ActiveVOS without any training.

Let us help you get on a two-step program to recovery. First, figure out what it’ll cost you to use ActiveVOS. We publish our prices — which anybody can understand — right on our website. Step two: download ActiveVOS, try it, and see how much you can achieve with a fraction of the effort or pain compared to anything — and I mean anything  — else out there.

Go on…give the gesture back to Oracle, SAP and IBM. It’ll feel great. You’ll be 10 years younger, you’ll feel like a new man or woman…and your enterprise development capabilities will loose two tons of weight.

I expect that by now most everyone has seen the amazing film Wall-E in which a corporation called BNL — for “Big and Large” literally destroys Earth and emasculates humanity of its ability to survive on the planet.

Ryan Bagnulo of Aspect-i and I were talking about enterprises and their surprising tendency to remain with the status quo even when they should know better. And how that’s just fine with the big three — IBM, Oracle and SAP. Suddenly, Ryan said, “That’s kind of what happened in Wall-E!” At that point, I had to record the conversation for our listeners because it was so compelling a comparison.

That lead to this podcast in which Ryan and I discuss how IBM, SAP and Oracle are almost exactly like BNL and are quite content to let enterprises get so porked up on closed, proprietary application development software that they can’t get out of their chairs…to mix metaphors.

We hope you like the podcast, and as always, welcome your responses.

[After I posted this, I came across this broadside of SAP's pricing policies on Cnet. Need any more proof that these companies will suck the life out of enterprise application development buyers?]

 

 VOSibilities podcast #13: How IBM, SAP and Oracle could have been in "Wall-E" [7:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (41)

I checked Wikipedia to see what a “sapphire” really is because I wondered if SAP’s SAPPHIRE trade show was using it as a pun on its company name and the “clarity” of a sapphire. Turns out it might be, since Wikipedia defines it as a mineral that’s not red. Unfortunately, the recent SAPPHIRE I attended has me seeing red.

Check out this slide from their announcement of their “BPM” products:

Once past the initial hype, what SAP claims to be bringing to market seems to be more hope than code. What bothered me the most are their claims of an “executable” business process model and that “immediate execution” speeds time to value. Hold on there…even if you did execute the model directly, is that necessarily a good thing?

Surely SAP isn’t suggesting that all of a sudden, you’re going to stop following best practices and the SDLC that you have developed over the years: separation of concern from the model, its implementation, testing, and methodical deployment across development, sit/cit and pre-production environments before you put it in production.

Beyond the question of what the right thing to do is in terms of development process, what exactly did SAP announce? A beta of BPM/BRM that will be released this June with the actual product shipping — maybe — in March 2009. (We’re hearing it’s $4500 per seat. Get that special checkbook you use for SAP products ready…you know the one with eight zeros pre-printed in the amount field.)

When it ships next March, there will be no announced integration with BPEL and no means of import/export of the BPMN from the tool that SAP customers have largely adopted, ARIS.

We talked with ARIS customers who aren’t happy about the lack of integration. One we spoke with uses ARIS heavily to model processes and hand them over to development. Instead, SAP chose to generate executable code directly bypassing the developer. If you believe SAP, you’ve now empowered your business analysts with the means to build executable models.

The good news is that you now have 300 new developers; the bad news is that you have 300 new developers. Is there an IT group on the planet that would deploy such a model in production directly? Please let us know if you do…we want to see how you’ve managed to skip validation, testing, performance trials and all the rest of the standard things a real application has to have.

SAP indicated that interoperability with ARIS is not possible because of a lack of a standard for BPMN serialization. While that’s true — BPMN is a notation (i.e. not an executable process definition like BPEL) — not having import/export with ARIS only suggests SAP is more interested in account control than real BPM. If it was motivated in ensuring no lock-in, SAP would have worked more closely with ARIS in developing an import/export mechanism, maybe via XPDL or XMI. But they haven’t, and while we’re only speculating, it seems clear why they haven’t. So much for the claims by ARIS at SAPPHIRE that ARIS is the “Business Processing Arm of SAP”.

See why does this have us seeing red? We’re steaming for the SAP customers who actually buy this line…who’ll be waiting a year (at best) for capabilities they need today…who’ll end up even more locked-in than ever to proprietary, closed, non-standards-compliant applications.

Well, I’m back from the long Memorial Day weekend (the weather here in the Boston area was spectacular for this traditional start-of-summer holiday). It was great to be offline for a few days, and this morning — like millions of other people just back into the office —  I’ve been plowing through the astonishing amount of email I collected over the long holiday.

In doing so, I came across an email that’s so indicative of the pain and suffering that is inflicted on developers by enterprise software companies that it completely jolted me back into the reality of what we’re trying to accomplish here with ActiveVOS. Before I post this message in its entirety — I’ve only removed names to protect the identity of my colleague who sent me the message — please let me set the stage a little.

When we were at JavaOne, SAP announced it’s ushering in a “new era in BPM“ (They can’t actually call it a product because, according to the release, you can’t buy it until, at best, ”early 2009″). A colleague and I sat through a presentation and demo, if you can call it that, of the new capabilities. The SAP presenter wasn’t able to get his screenshot demo — no live code — into screen show mode in PowerPoint. (I guess he hasn’t been to the five-day SAP employee class Introduction to F5 in Microsoft PowerPoint yet.) It was one of the worst demos I’ve ever seen. Or, maybe, it was one of the best demos I’ve ever seen. Depends on your perspective.

A DVD was distributed, which my colleague — being more technical than I am — laid claim to. What follows are his emails to me from last week that I just read this morning: 

Okay, Alex, I’ve spent most of today trying to install the SAP NetWeaver product, and so far have had several failures on the install and am not sure how to proceed. I will continue searching their install forums and so on, and maybe trying other options in their install dialogs, but I am sick of blowing time on it.

How would you like me to proceed? Would you prefer I sent you up the DVD to let you play with it for a while? [Uh....no. - ed.] If you get it installed, you could send it back, and I could try again, but maybe you’d like to get your hands on it for a while. [Yeah, right...I want to sign up to be this frustrated. - ed.] Certainly, if you have as many troubles as I did, your blog entry could consist of documenting the install difficulties alone! [And here it is. - ed.]

I found recommendations on the SAP support forum for this installer to install the demo on a VM image instead of on your actual machine, because the install can fail and screw up your registry etc. The normal enterprise “I need to do this to run my mega-app, so get out of my way and let me do anything I want on your machine, and no, I don’t play well with others” crap… Of course, my machine isn’t really powerful enough to install to a VMWare image rather than my machine, so I haven’t tried that path. Besides, I have several partially completed installs already started on my machine, so it isn’t clean any more anyway.

Then, a day later, this update:

As expected, when I came in today, the SAP installer I left up overnight was still reporting it was processing step 18 of 30 install steps. I also notice a performance issue on my machine now – I’ve stopped any autostart services SAP installed, but I have to go through and thoroughly cleanse my machine from their shite as well. I still have the DVD – I might try again over the next week or so to do the install, but it is not top of my list… 

Rightfully so. I can’t imagine it’d be at the top of any developer’s list of things to do. From the concept, to the “demo” to the user’s out-of-box experience, it’s becoming pretty clear that SAP’s BPM initiative started with wheels that have some real issues, like not being round.

Whew…it’s been a busy week. We were at JavaOne, threw a great party (pix soon, I promise), met lots of people and got lots of great feedback.

Oh, and speaking of parties, we crashed SAPPHIRE in Orlando. Yes, it was we who dressed up actors in prison uniforms labelled “SAP County Jail” on the back and had the actors hand out ActiveVOS demo CD’s labelled “SAP Liberation Plan” and “Evidence” during SAP’s big user convention last week.

Why? In two words: public service. SAP bigots may think that’s an over-the-top characterization of what they will label as a PR stunt. But there is a method to our madness. We are convinced that SAP is pulling the wool over users’ eyes about BPM. And while we are realistic about our chances of liberating today’s SAP users, we feel compelled to reach out to them just in case they want a get-out-of-proprietary-BPM-jail plan.

What am I talking about? Consider this interview with an SAP architect who says:

SAP NetWeaver already provides capabilities to model and execute business processes that include both automated activities as well as human-executed activities. As the BPEL4People standardization progresses we will presumably see more and more compliant implementations.

Isn’t it clever to conflate NetWeaver — the most closed, proprietary BPMS on the planet — with BPEL4People? If you can just get a little of that standards-based branding onto your proprietary platform (especially in an press interview about standards), it may be enough to keep the prisoners in lock-down and maybe even bring a new busload or two inside the gates.

By “…we will presumably see more and more compliant implementations” I presume SAP was referring to the announcement last week of SAP’s plans for BPM, in which they purport to “usher in a new era” in BPM. The interview was published before the press release was issued, but if this is what she was referring to, it looks like NetWeaver users looking to free their business processes from proprietary stacks have just had their jail sentences unilaterally extended.

Consider three points. FIrst, there’s not a single standard mentioned in this press release. That’s not ushering in a new era. That’s 1980 all over again. Second, notice the repeated use of the phrase “the planned implementation.” This is all about some SAP NetWeaver product you can’t actually get until Q1 2009. Can you say, “freeze-dry the prisoners until we’re ready?” Third, I fell asleep during a demo of this at JavaOne in which the demoer couldn’t even get a PowerPoint to work.

‘Nuff said (for now). Be sure to watch the hilarious video of our “prisoners” being harassed in Orlando as they attempt to hand out CD’s to arriving guests. We didn’t go inside the hall. We didn’t interfere with anyone…but SAP set the security people on us anyway. Guess a little standards-based competition is too much for the self-proclaimed ushers of a new era.

 

 Video of Active Endpoints attempting to liberate SAP users at SAPPHIRE [2:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (314)