The Long Schwanz for SAP
October 29th, 2005 by Adam Cuothe
Shai Agassi, SAP’s product and technology group president, had this to say to AlwaysOn regarding SAP gettin’ some tail.
…The problem is that nobody could have built it before. To build the long tail before would have required building the whole infrastructure. We’re opening up the opportunity for people now to address the long tail with a significantly cheaper mode of distribution, if you will, or platforming. But to do it, you need a significant investment, and you need a ubiquitous platform underneath, and we’re the only player that has made the investment so far.
He continues to share how SAP is the only company among IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, to develop something called an applistructure (combination infrastructure with applications), and how SAP is trying to open itself up to community processes. The point being, if I understand correctly, that SAP will ask the multitude of lonely little guys to suck its big schwanz. Seems SAP’s caught on to the notion that there’s money to be had if it can just get its software to address the unique special needs of a really vast range of small potential clients. This of course, is talk, in relation to the notion put forward by Chris Anderson, in his article, The Long Tail. But it’s something else as well. You see Agassi, in an effort to hype SAP’s hip quotient, is posturing about community. He’s connected (probably rightly so) an idea of how the immensely varied and wide-ranging open source community might address the problem of the long tail. Unfortunately SAP is one of the many companies that mostly pays lip service to open source models, tries to make itself sound like it’s on the band wagon but really isn’t. Let’s get specific.
Look at open source, for example… Most customers… gain is innovation by community. They gain the ability for thousands of innovators to leverage that same core, and build extensions to that core. And then they can combine the core, and by joint central maintenance of that core, they get the value of faster growth.
So SAP thinks it can do the same thing without subscribing to the Free/Libre or open source ideologies/practices/etc. Here is the give-away. Agassi like every corporate poseur, extolls the virtue of open source then immediately says his company will reap the same rewards by being “open” but not open source.
If you look at where SAP is today, we’re basically saying that we have a core that is extremely strong. And what we’re doing now is opening it up. We’re creating—not a software service, but a software interface and services. And the interface level is the most important thing.
See? He just smoothely switches the subject by using the word “open” by itself and saying how the company will let other people work with it. No, in fact the company retain’s strict controls, which fly in the face of Free software ideology. Be wary of this doublespeak strategy, a lot of companies are using it. It’s an, if A is A, then A is A that SAP, in its inability to de-stodgify, will be unable to attract the unique suckers of its potential johnpool. Its unexpected competitors are the ones that will get it–providing a real pounding to poor, misunderstood, Pareto.
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