SAP
Historical notes on software titan SAP AG. Related subjects include:
- Application software
- (in DBMS2) SAP’s database-related strategies
- (in DBMS2) SAP’s Business Objects business intelligence subsidiary
- (in Text Technologies) SAP’s TREX search engine and Inxight text analytics technology
- (in The Monash Report) Operational and strategic issues for SAP
Prerelational financial app software vendors 1 — a quick overview
MSA (Management Science America). This section got so long I’m breaking it out as a separate post just about MSA.
M & D (McCormack & Dodge). M & D was MSA’s archrival in mainframe financial software. They had various claims to product superiority, based on having “more CPAs on staff” than MSA and also on being first to market with realtime applications. However, M & D sold out early to Dun & Bradstreet, and lost its edge as key managers left.
M & D seems to have been a lively company. Many stories about drugs or sex emerged (I don’t actually recall any drugs-and-sex-combined stories, for whatever reasons). Key players included: Frank Dodge, a former schoolteacher who founded another not terribly successful apps company (The Dodge Group) afterwards; Jim McCormack, who happily retired from software into real estate, but sadly died a few years later; development chief John Landry, who’s been a prominent industry figure ever since, and sales/marketing chief Bob Weiler, ditto. Landry and Weiler went together to Distribution Management Systems, Cullinet (after it bought DMS), and Lotus, before going their separate ways.
M & D’s venture into manufacturing applications seemed later and more half-hearted than Comserv’s or Cullinet’s. But they eventually did wind up with a version of (and may even have bought control of) the Rath & Strong technology.
Cullinet. Cullinet was better known as a DBMS vendor. But in a precursor of what became the Oracle strategy, it pursued financial and manufacturing applications as well. The financial applications were originally licensed from M & D. The manufacturing apps were originally licensed from Rath & Strong, as were M & D’s.
One negative consequence was that the industry teamed up against Cullinet. For example, ADR in DBMS and MSA in apps formed a close marketing relationship. To general industry agreement at the time, I dubbed this the ABC (Anybody But Cullinet) strategy.
Cincom. DBMS vendor Cincom pursued a Cullinet-like apps strategy. Not many people cared.
J. D. Edwards. If I recall correctly, JDE’s main platform was the IBM System 38, the predecessor to the AS/400. Anyhow, JDE was a Denver-based financial software company. Its main claim to fame, other than the platform that it ran on, was a superb order entry system. Rob Kelley, referring to his days at Arthur Andersen, once told me that Andersen’s order entry system had had 45,000 lines of code, JDE’s had had 5,000 lines, and JDE’s had been better.
SAP. I’ve already written up what I recall about SAP in the 1980s.
This initial list leaves a lot of companies out, of course. Other than the MRP companies — ASK, NCA, XCS, and so on — the biggest omission may be Walker Interactive. But also missing are Global Software, Data Design, a whole lot of human resources specialists and so on.
Also missing are other vertical market groups, most notably in banking software, which is where general ledger products (the first major financial application) first succeeded in a big way.
I hope to get around to writing about these subjects before too long.
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SAP Memories
Until the past couple of years, I didn’t have a lot of dealings with SAP. (That has now changed significantly.) But it seems that the things I do recall aren’t that widely known anymore.
I first heard of SAP in the 1980s. It was a smaller company than the then-leading mainframe application software vendors. Peter Zencke told me earlier this week that when he joined in 1983, the company had around 100 employees. From memory about MSA’s figures, I’d guess SAP’s revenue was somewhere in the $150-250,000 range. Also from memory, I’d guess that MSA and M&D (McCormack & Dodge) were meaningfully bigger than SAP at that time. I also think that SAP combined financial and manufacturing applications earlier than the other mainframe vendors did, and hence probably got more revenue per client from a small number of clients. (MSA didn’t get into manufacturing apps until they bought Comserv, which if I recall correctly never broke the $20 million revenue mark on its own.)
SAP was almost unique among significant software vendors in being based outside the US, Software AG being the other obvious big example. There was no Business Objects then, of course. I don’t think that any of the UK companies that eventually made a modest impact — MicroFocus, LBMS, and much more recently Autonomy — were even active then. So it was pretty much off of people’s radar screens …
Indeed, at one point in the early 1990s I wrote to the effect of “Hey! There really are some important European software companies!” And spurred by that, my clients at Fidelity Investments invested in SAP. Too bad they were perennially stingy about compensation for good investment ideas …
Anyhow, the word on SAP from its competitors was that in the US at least, SAP focused tremendous sales effort on a small number of prospects, and in those accounts they were very hard to beat. These accounts seemed to be centered on the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, presumably because those industries were particularly strong in SAP’s home German market. Not coincidentally, SAP’s US operations were headquartered in Pennsylvania, near the New Jersey stronghold of those industries in the US. It’s natural to conjecture that SAP had superior functionality for process manufacturing industries, something that was pretty primitive in those days, but I don’t recall any direct mentions of this.
I learned more in the early 1990s when Jeremy Coote called up and introduced himself. He was the CFO of SAP’s US operations (he later went on to a big job at Siebel). It turned out that SAP had some contractual reason only to invest limited resources in the US. But that would change soon; one of the directors was coming over to run things in the US personally; and so on. Obviously, they lived up to that much more than I could possibly have envisioned at the time.
The story of how SAP’s rise dovetailed with the growth of the public accounting firms’ consulting practices is better known; I’ll leave the telling of that to another time.
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