Translators required going forward, episode II

MN says:

04:52pm | 12/05/10

With an IT Press Release like this - I’d say right release, wrong audience.  What the hell are you meant to do with it?  Anyway, let me see if I can help…

Mid size companies in Australia and New Zealand who are interested in SAP but don’t have the internal skills to manage it, can now use SAP Business All in One.  SAP Business All in One is a hosted solution, leaving all SAP deployment and management to approved SAP suppliers.

This saves customers the expense of pre-requisite skills or training for existing IT staff.
 
SAP integration partner, CIBER, is the first to offer this hosting in Australia and New Zealand. 

???  I could be wrong…

Brad Price says:

04:57pm | 12/05/10

Isn’t SAP the program that is getting QLD Health into so much pay strife at the moment…...
To be fair to SAP it has more to do with the project management capabilities of QLD Health than problems with SAP.

Matt the spin doctor says:

05:10pm | 12/05/10

And journalists complain about spin doctors.

This is what happens when you let IT geeks and lawyers write press releases.

Wouldn’t have happened if they’d hired a decent comms specialist.

Ben says:

05:15pm | 12/05/10

Translation: “We have partners who will host our software so you dont have to pay for the infrastructure or staff to manage it.”

All of the jargon seems to have been come up with in a findstorm/blue sky session/ideas shower “hosted” “deep industry” “solutions” “channel partners” “delivery” “channel”

Stilgherrian says:

05:29pm | 12/05/10

In defence of my fellow geeks, I must point out that we don’t describe things as “offerings” or talk about “delivery channels”. That’s markerter-cant. Geeks use specific, concrete language—even if it’s technical—because technical language requires precision.

Dan says:

10:43pm | 12/05/10

I had the cruel and unusual misfortune of working for a company that uses SAP for a couple of years up until 2008.  To enter hours worked every week, we had to run a program within the SAP program called zGY2097G or something like that.  You literally had to type that in under the “run” prompt every week.  SAP is probably the clunkiest program I have ever used.  They have taken everything that was difficult about DOS and figured out a way to do something even more difficult, only with less functionality.  Every time I looked up a part, I had to write down the details on a piece of paper so that I could go back to the beginning and look up the datasheet (or whatever info) - there were no links from the parts to their data pages within the SAP program.  I could go on.  For about a year.  I had assumed that SAP was put together by a couple of students in their spare time, but apparently it’s top of the line stuff.  The press release is telling you that your company can also partake in the wonder that is SAP without having to install it “on site”:  basically they have a version that runs on a server outside your company, so you don’t have to worry about tech support and all that stuff.  Believe me, that press release is possibly one of the clearest and most user-friendly things that SAP has ever produced.

Dave Sag says:

10:36am | 13/05/10

SAP’s gone Cloud Computing.

All your data are belong to SAP.

Dave Sag says:

10:43am | 13/05/10

Everyone is doing it BTW.  MYOB have just announced that they too will be offering ‘hosted’ solutions, ie they run the app and you interact via a web interface. (this is cloud computing in a nutshell btw)

see http://www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/myob-launches-online-accounting-package-20100512-uwlw.html

It’s a great trend and makes like simpler for application developers and offers greater power to small businesses for their buck.  It also means that other web-based (ie cloud) services that need data from these systems can do so more easily.  For example the G3MS carbon accounting toolkit ( http://www.g3ms.net )  would probably have no problems taking feeds from MYOB Online (or from SAP online for that matter).

Trolldoll says:

12:55pm | 13/05/10

Basically it means that if you have a decent internet connection for your buisness, these people will store the information for you buisness and make sure it’s running so you don’t have to sully your hands with Geeks, BTW I am a Geek. So if you don’t mind running up a big internet bill for your company you cn get rid of your Geeks.

Chris says:

12:46pm | 17/05/10

From my experience, I can assume this was a release written by an SAP representative outside of Australia for global distribution, which was meant to be localised. However SAP Australia’s comms team and external PR agency have dismally failed to do this - instead just pasting ‘ANZ’ into several parts of the release and declaring it localised. I am also a little confused as to why the information in this release would be of interest to The Punch writers?