Re: ot: Please reference to excellent Enterprise

Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco wrote:
> Thanks a lot Dennis, I know how big they are, but if you want to
>start one, you have to start from somewhre, I know about accounting,
>employee, etc.
> What I was looking was good sources for ideas designing erps.
        

I did this in the mid-80's. The world was a much simpler place then. We basically took the big sellers on our platform of the time and grabbed all the good features of each. I used formal relational design methodology of the day, and designed and wrote a modular programming system so we could have an easily customized base product, rapidly coming up with a working system, then leisurely using consultants to improve various parts as necessary/funding available, even in assembler or BLISS for performance issues.

We did lose one customer around 1988 to Oracle. The Oracle consultants severely underestimated the amount of disk necessary because our base database was much more efficient space-wise. Oracle wound up buying them some disk :-)

I had layered the system to be able to interface to arbitrary databases (relational and otherwise), but it was a little too ahead of its time for people to comprehend why one would do such a thing. But the pdp/vax compatibility found a small niche market - for a time, the biggest PDP had better I/O for things like data entry than most VAX.

They eventually found it easier to market a data editor for databases. I bailed for the unix/oracle world. Eventually I found work administering "database independent" ERP packages, some from the '60s with layers of assembler, cobol, bourne shell scripting, c shell scripting, bourne shell scripting labelled c shell scripting, PL/SQL packages...

The important thing to note is that the current competition has many man-years of development. They are successful if they work, irregardless of the quality of programming. Hopefully Larry will improve quality, but I sure wouldn't want to compete with Oracle any time soon. Even with Microsoft's resources.

Joel Garry
http://www.garry.to
 

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