SAP CRM - no confidence in UI by SAP?

Question

After reading this blog and looking at the article attached to the blog.  I had an interesting question:
Can Rich Internet Applications finally be accepted as a credible application development platform for SAP?
Does SAP have any confidence in its own CRM software?  Right now SAP is touting how easy to use the new version of SAP CRM is, and yet this article implies they don't use their own product's user interface.
Now I know the eSOA mantra says this shouldn't matter, but I would say this is one of those cases where it doesn't.  If the vendor won't/can't use their own CRM software because the UI is too ugly/clumsy or other reason, why should I as a customer. 
As a customer I don't want to purchase a CRM software and then have to purchase a better UI to go on top of the software.  I might as well spend the money on software that might have a better UI perceived by my sales folks(think siebel, salesforce.com, sugarcm, etc), and spend those dollars on integration instead.  It's a lot cheaper to do integration work, than completely rewrite the UI to meet my users needs.
I'm also wondering why SAP would even send this message by displaying this article on SDN? I'm sure if the guys at oracle saw this article, we would see a press release from that says something of the like:
"Even SAP acknowledges, that SAP CRM is too difficult to use".
I bring this up because we are selling use of SAP CRM 2007 in house right now, and it makes it harder for me to sell the solution to my business users, if there are conflicting messages on the market. 
Take care,
Stephen

Answer 1

> Wow, you almost have the "nightmare" scenario when it comes to maintenance.  I just have to ask what functional areas (high level) did you implement?  Was it the marketing module?
I can tell you...
We were using Mobiles Sales with activities, campaigns, sales documents and master data and we switched that to CRM 2005 and Portal (+ adding BI reporting functionality with BI-CRM content). For the Java part there's enough said (by me) already, I won't start again with that (mess). The CRM looked pretty well at first sight but devil's in the detail.
> The marketing module in CRM 40 was so unstable on SP08 that basically we ditched the application and wrote something custom in the SAP GUI instead.  Any t-code that had over 400 related notes(segment builder) is just a nightmare not to mention just plain bugs in the PCUI that we weren't willing to wait a month for fixes.
Well.. people have always be VERY helpful, especially the guys and girls in India were doing a very good job at fixing bugs - once the communication was done via email and not via phone...;) But you're right - it's taking sometimes too much time to get a fix and yet-another-note.
> I still think the SAP GUI sometimes beats the web based interfaces, once you learn how to use it.  The problem was that everyone got obessed with zero-client installations and forgot about the benefits of "specialized" clients.  Now everyone is basically trying to make a web browser work like a desktop client, which puts you back full circle.  
Everyone THINKS it's zero installation but in fact you have to configure proxy exceptions, add/install certificates, enable/disable Javascript things, add trusted sites, (re-)configure firewalls on Laptops, delete browser caches, install SVG viewer and other "plugins", install and maintain security fixes for the browser etc. etc. and this on a distributed environment where our sales reps are spread over the whole world in different time zones. So the "zero-installation" is nothing but marketing flowery because the maintenance you needed to put into Mobile Sales is now needed for the browser - nice antagonism
> In would have been interesting to see how well SAP would have fared if they had made the mistake of making the original R/3 application 2-tier instead of a 3-tier client/server. 
It's been like that @ R/2 times and I must tell you I loved the green screens (http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/images_hist/R2-0.GIF and http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/images_hist/SCREENO1.GIF)
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