> Most of this money doesn't come from banks or venture capital funds, however. "Newly founded companies are mostly financed by the founders' own funds"<p>Ah the typical European startup dilemma. The governments recognize that in an age of difficult unemployment and stagnating growth, new avenues of entrepreneurship need to be embraced, and so they set up all sorts of programs to encourage new startups. But then these startups get beyond the very early stage, and need to raise capital to continue their growth. And the look to institutional money in Europe. And no one will give them any. Because the European investor mindset is so risk averse, that only those who already have money are considered safe enough to start real businesses (continuing the old guard).<p>Personally, I think that's great. You folks in Europe are just reasserting that we in the US have the more opportune climate for startups. And so we'll continue to steal all your good ones ;)
...by revenue<p>that's missing from the title.<p>Growing up I found that a tremendous amount of software I used was European, and most of it was free (as in beer). Not to disparage German software developers, but almost none of this software was German.<p>There's absolutely fantastic software from all over the continent, but due to various economic/cultural aspects doesn't revenue in quite the numbers boring SAP does.<p><i>edit</i> upon further review I've found a bit more German influence in my software than I remembered, sorry Germans!
A substantial percentage of SAPs revenue is from consulting, and if you're going to include that then why not Accenture who has twice the revenue of SAP and is HQ'd in Ireland. Or Erricson who might primarily do hardware, but make $8bn/year from software revenue.
Way off topic: what accounting software is everyone using?<p>I've been hunting for something that is a well designed SaaS product, yet is highly scriptable with a great API to allow me to automate more of our transaction flow.<p>Right now we've got a part time book keeper whom spends most of her time copy and pasting things around in quickbooks, its just silly. Unfortunately we have a 'complicated' transaction flow, by 'complicated' I mean none of the ultra-simple SaaS models seems to allow modeling it correctly, but it could be done with a couple dozen lines of script if the software allowed that.<p>I'm currently stuck either keeping things as are, which sucks, or massively overpaying for SAP Business ByDesign to get the needed flexibility. It seems like there is a bit of a hole in the market between the ultra simple SaaS solutions and the SAP's of the world. It seems like NetSuite used to fill this gap but has moved up market.<p>Is Xero getting to the point where they can at least partially fill that hole? Anyone else out there that is close?
Meanwhile, SAP is (indirectly) funneling part of the revenue from clueless enterprise into... Hasso Plattner Institut! One of the world's hotbeds of computer science innovation (<a href="http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/willkommen.html?L=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/willkommen.html?L=1</a>)<p>"Professor Hasso Plattner [co-founder of the global software company SAP and chairman of its supervisory board] has pledged the foundation from his private assets for the day-to-day running of the Institute over a period of more than 20 years. Due to his commitment, he is one of the most important private supporters of science in Germany."<p>Ironic? Visionary? Whatever it is, good work is being done, orthogonally to SAP's main venture.
The company I work for has an internal software suite (mostly Java EE) that's rolled out across Europe, and we have a SAP team too who deal with all the accountancy stuff.<p>Some aspects of the systems I work on have to communicate with SAP and I find the whole process quite frankly, bizarre. The way SAP names procedures is weird, it just seems so clunky.<p>Whenever the SAP team come to us to say they've added a new column and we need to support it makes me weep a bit when having to type in ZTRANS_TTP_ORDER_TYPE everywhere to support their bullshit.
While I have barely used the SAP system where I work, I could intuitively sense its value. Only half joking, I have claimed that If i could get a half dozen good co-ops, we could build a far better system with LAMP in about 6 months.
( I know that LAMP is dated, but other than what I have read here, I know little about the more modern frameworks)
Which is very sad, because it is the worst crap ever.<p>Usually it works like this:<p>Specially trained sales people approach executives of a company with stable money flows. They tell all that nonsense about how prestigious SAP is, that all successful businesses runs SAP, that it is kind of a simbol of maturity of the company and that it having SAP installed is good for IPO. Most of execs who have no idea what crap it is just agree.<p>For IT execs it is even better. SAP installs a ready bureaucracy system inside a company. All those meaningless titles, training, certificates, as if you really learn something valuable. Usually IT manager involved in running or supporting SAP have a guaranteed position, they say.<p>Needless to say, that they have a ready "processes" based on paper-pushing inside a newly formed hierarchy.<p>Now about software. It is worse crap ever. It is a mess of Java, inhouse ABAP layers, and thousands of SQL stored procedures with meaningless names.<p>All <i>technical</i> and troubleshutting documentation, which is crap, available only with paid subsribtion, explaining almost nothing. What is available for free PR, success stories and use cases, which is completely meaningless lies.<p>Software itself is a mess. There are hundreds of different version which are incompatible with each other, and only this version people know what to do.<p>All installations usually performed by stupid drones without any background using detailed instructions with screenshots of each step. Usually typical SAP "certified professional" know nothing but a few such instructions.<p>Support is much worse. Nobody know anything, all they do is finger-pointing. All problems usually solved with a new re-install and then import whatever data we have in last backup.<p>Data loses are normal thing. Bugs and gliches are normal. Incompetence is rampant. But SAP bill you for each hour of each consultant involved, and each document passed through system. May be even for each transaction.<p>After all crap is installed and organization are shaken up it is already too late and too costly to revert. This is why SAP is so "successful" - when you "invest" in it you are done for, and you just sign the bills and have your "signs of maturity".<p>This is only quick overview. I can write a brochure what a crap it is.)