Re: Complex licensing
"I have to say, for this reason, when people who don't work in IT talk to me about IT and are so keen to tell me that they've just moved over to SAP, or Oracle, or whatever, I shake my head and walk away. Some day it will come back to hurt them. Many of them don't even know what it is and certainly don't work in a company large enough to justify it, they've just heard that other bigger people do, so they end up on the same things."
^This.
The subject is very timely because where I am today, one of the front-office guys said to me last week that "we need SAP." Knowing eff all about it, I looked it up, and decided that we don't - but asking the guy for more details (such as which SAP product specifically), he wasn't able to give me any, other than "a potential customer uses it, but they can't use us unless we do too."
Unsurprisingly, that sounds like utter nonsense to me - if true, it would surely means no SAP-using business can use the services of any non-SAP-using business; the logical progression if that claim were true is that if we used this (unspecified) SAP product, our suppliers would have to as well - and would the same problem occur the other way? Would our customers also therefore need to use it?
So his reason was probably down to his not having a clue about it (as per what Lee says above), or whoever he's spoken to at this potential customer not having a clue about it (ditto) - or both.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
