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Will MaxDB beat Oracle and SQLserver in the market?

Former Member
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Somebody tells me that eventually MaxDB will dominate the market.

I do not believe. Do you agree? Thanks!

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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> Somebody tells me that eventually MaxDB will dominate the market.

>

> I do not believe. Do you agree? Thanks!

Of course it won't.

SAP does not even try to do that.

SAP is not a database company - it's a business infrastructure company.

And MaxDB is a part of the solution stack.

It's not a product on it's own, you cannot buy it, you cannot get commercial support without beeing a regular SAP customer.

This does not render MaxDB less useful to SAP customers or to open source users than the other DBMS are.

It's as professional as the other DBMSes are and it comes with a really small price tag

regards,

Lars

former_member192710
Participant
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Hi Lars, *;

interesting that this is coming up here, as it pretty much fits our "thoughts" right now... A while ago I used to write a mail to Mr Hoffmeister asking for support / consulting options for "non SAP" customers regarding MaxDB in a "non SAP" environment and recieved a very friendly answer basically outlining that SAP is not offering things to "non SAP" customers but rather pointing me to another company offering this kind of service at the moment.

>

> SAP is not a database company - it's a business infrastructure company.

> And MaxDB is a part of the solution stack.

> It's not a product on it's own, you cannot buy it, you cannot get commercial support without beeing a regular SAP customer.

Though of course strategy decisions like this usually aren't subject of any explanation, I still wonder here. I mean, after all: There eventually are people who don't want (or need, for that matters) the rest of the SAP product or services portfolio but "just" show an expressed interest in one component (MaxDB). Unfortunately, they can't get any support or help on that as they aren't "regular SAP customers", but vice versa, they don't have a chance of becoming a "regular SAP customer" just for this very product. I wonder what's the reason for this, because, after all and at least to me, this seems an interesting business model: MaxDB, compared to Oracle or MSSQL, is straightforward enough in installation, deployment, administration to not need much "support" about this, to not require too much "administration courses" or things like this - simply dump it to your server, start it and get goin', it's even more straightforward that mySQL here in my opinion. And yet, getting the "full" potential from it in a non-SAP environment yet will just be possible by optimizing things to perfectly fit the given use case in terms of database structure, database parameter tuning, collecting and analyzing database performance information, doing operating system optimizations and so forth. From this point of view, the business model to "give the database away for free" to "non SAP users" yet offer consulting ("we send you engineers at $1000 per day to get the most out of your system") should be beneficial for both sides.

Cheers,

Kristian

Edited by: Kristian Rink on May 28, 2009 8:28 AM

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Though of course strategy decisions like this usually aren't subject of any explanation, I still wonder

here. I mean, after all: There eventually are people who don't want (or need, for that matters) the rest of

the SAP product or services portfolio but 'just' show an expressed interest in one component

(MaxDB). Unfortunately, they can't get any support or help on that as they aren't 'regular SAP

customers', but vice versa, they don't have a chance of becoming a 'regular SAP customer' just for

this very product.

That's right - as written above, MaxDB is not sold as a product. So consequently neither is the support for it.

I wonder what's the reason for this, because, after all and at least to me, this seems an interesting

business model: MaxDB, compared to Oracle or MSSQL, is straightforward enough in installation,

deployment, administration to not need much 'support' about this, to not require too much

'administration courses' or things like this - simply dump it to your server, start it and get goin', it's even

more straightforward that mySQL here in my opinion.

Full ACK!

I mean, really, I know what we're good at

But to be serious - putting MaxDB into the solution stack and not as a product is a business decision.

It's not about technical ability, feature set or something like that.

And yet, getting the 'full' potential from it in a non-SAP environment yet will just be possible by

optimizing things to perfectly fit the given use case in terms of database structure, database parameter

tuning, collecting and analyzing database performance information, doing operating system

optimizations and so forth. From this point of view, the business model to 'give the database away for

free' to 'non SAP users' yet offer consulting ('we send you engineers at $1000 per day to get the most

out of your system') should be beneficial for both sides.

Depends on what 'beneficial' really means.

SAP does have agreements and partnerships with all the important DBMS vendors.

These companies have whole LOBs just for the database product.

They make money from it.

And they may be annoyed to have another competitor on the scene.

SAP does not do this. SAP does not sell programs. SAP sells business solutions.

That's where our money comes from - providing solutions to every customers business so that the customer can make better business.

A DBMS is not a business solution - it's 'just' a piece of software.

I don't think that SAP says 'What's $1000/day? We don't need that!'.

It's just not that easy to create a product/service offering that both satisfies our customers and that can be integrated into our current processes.

One example: remote access to the database systems and the analysis tools of the SAP NetWeaver CCMS.

Both of them are crucial for the day to day support for MaxDB/liveCache work we do for SAP customers.

Without them, support becomes slow, cost intensive (for us) and difficult.

Since SAP customers do have all this infrastructure it's easy to offer them support for a MaxDB that is used for something else.

Personally I do of course see that there is some interest from the 'Open Source' users for such an offering.

I also see that there are constraints to the development of MaxDB that maybe wouldn't be so tight if this would be a product on its own (there are really only a few people developing it, compared with other DBMS vendors...)

Anyhow, I also believe that the business decision is correct - DBMS market is basically saturated and the past years have shown that there are only a few 'switchers'.

DISCLAIMER

As usual when talking about SAP business strategy, these are my personal thoughts and views and in no way any kind of official statement of SAP.

best regards,

Lars

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Sorry everyone who tries to read my reply.

Somehow the forum software is currently incapable of formatting posts correctly.

As I found no way to get the reply posted with the correct line breaks I have to leave it as it is.

Lars

former_member192710
Participant
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Hi Lars;

and at first, thanks a bunch for the well-put reply.

>

> But to be serious - putting MaxDB into the solution stack and not as a product is a business decision.

> It's not about technical ability, feature set or something like that.

Yes. I am fully aware of this. It seems the case in most of these situations, and, as I stated, eventually business decisions and strategic decisions are just to be taken as granted.

> Depends on what "beneficial" really means.

> SAP does have agreements and partnerships with all the important DBMS vendors.

> These companies have whole LOBs just for the database product.

> They make money from it.

> And they may be annoyed to have another competitor on the scene.

That, for sure, sounds reasonable. But, from that point of view, of course (not wanting to be provocative): If not wanting to be into the database market after all, having partnerships with all major database vendors, and eventually having a load of open source databases out there to build upon for those who don't want Oracle, why bother maintaining "another" custom DBM system after all? This seems somewhat ambivalent.

> SAP does not do this. SAP does not sell programs. SAP sells business solutions.

> That's where our money comes from - providing solutions to every customers business so that the customer can make better business.

Yes... Yesss. That's what I see, and that's what we want. We don't really care about buying a piece of DBMS software. Our business is to offer services based upon software, some being third-party code (be that open source or proprietary), some being developed or at least customized in-house. DBMS is something we see as a basic service which just "should be there" without having to bother that much. In most cases (Oracle, DB2, or also mySQL) it is not like this - one has to deal with buying licenses, with education to dig deep into the guts of these systems, and then the "real work" just starts. MaxDB does rather good here leaving this "getting-started" hurdle rather low. And for the rest, at least from our point of view, MaxDB service (support, on-demand custom training, help in performance tuning, ...) on top of this indeed seems a "business solution", thus no contradiction to what SAP business is all about...

I think you are basically right about database market being saturated relating to DBMS as "boxed products". However, the "other" market (free or open source "product" along with enterprise strength support on top for those who want / need it) so far mainly seems dominated by mySQL and, to some degree, postgreSQL. Not sure whether this is (yet?) an actual market, though. Maybe the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and, subsequently, the fact of mySQL being at stake to some degree could be an option for MaxDB to attract more users...

> One example: remote access to the database systems and the analysis tools of the SAP NetWeaver CCMS.

> Both of them are crucial for the day to day support for MaxDB/liveCache work we do for SAP customers.

> Without them, support becomes slow, cost intensive (for us) and difficult.

> Since SAP customers do have all this infrastructure it's easy to offer them support for a MaxDB that is used for something else.

I see... I also can imagine that supporting MaxDB used for something, well, eventually "unfamiliar" (unknown application / table structure, unknown user infrastructure, ...) is rather more difficult than, say, supporting it for a bunch of well-known applications and environments. From this point, the most straightforward (and eventually only?) way seems a "rent-an-engineer" kind of support approach - have someone visit your site for a couple of days to look around things, to look at what's there and try evaluating what could be wrong / improved / ... . But indeed maybe this is beyond the scope of SAP business approach...

> Personally I do of course see that there is some interest from the "Open Source" users for such an offering.

> I also see that there are constraints to the development of MaxDB that maybe wouldn't be so tight if this would be a product on its own (there are really only a few people developing it, compared with other DBMS vendors...)

Or, another way 'round, if people would have paid more attention... Remembering the "dual licensing experiment" of MaxDB < 7.6 beind distributed by mySQL AB, I kinda hoped MaxDB attracting a couple of open source developers to participate in development and, eventually, "adopt" the source code and help driving forth MaxDB as something like a "corporate backed open source" project. Obviously, it didn't seem to work out this way, if it was intended to be like this at all...

> DISCLAIMER:

As usual when talking about SAP business strategy, these are my personal thoughts and views and in no way any kind of official statement of SAP.

Acknowledged.

Cheers,

Kristian

Edited by: Kristian Rink on May 28, 2009 9:29 AM

Edited by: Kristian Rink on May 28, 2009 9:30 AM

former_member192710
Participant
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>

> Sorry everyone who tries to read my reply.

>

> Somehow the forum software is currently incapable of formatting posts correctly.

> As I found no way to get the reply posted with the correct line breaks I have to leave it as it is.

>

> Lars

Indeed... I tried to copy-and-paste the message off the e-mail notification sent out which seemed to be formatted correctly, but seems my reply is broken as well. Sorry.

K.

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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I just got a hint to this thread:

At least now we know why this crap is as it is...

Lars

former_member192710
Participant
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I see. So eventually it's wait-and-see, if this might be fixed...

Cheers,

Kristian

Answers (1)

Answers (1)

lbreddemann
Active Contributor
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Wow Kelly!

That's a lot of points for a bit of chatting around.

thanks and best regards,

Lars