"Has anyone used ... SAP ... and thought "wow, this is really great!"?"
Yes. HANA is an excellent in memory database. Business Objects is really really cool at delivering data views that look great. Netweaver is a good foundation for enterprise business solutions. SAP Portal software is as excellent of a portal as you will find.
I could also list things I don't like, but to act like a huge software company like SAP doesn't have great software is silly.
"I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure."
Yes, that's what I'd argue is the worst. The user experience, and this is improving after the purchase of Business Objects. You can see this changing (finally). The problem you're mentioning isn't one of finance, or SAP, it's of R3 specifically.
R3 is a big part of SAP, so most of the complaints come from the user experience of R3. Totally valid. No doubts there.
There is a huge push for SAP to become more user friendly. What is nice is there are projects like HANA, SAP Gateway and Sybase Unwired Platform, which are all fairly new technologies that can expose existing SAP systems (i.e. R3 FI Module) and bring them into a better user experience. Check out SAP gateway: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/gateway
Gateway for example allows you to expose traditional SAP core functions to RESTful APIs and supports Ruby, PHP, Java, etc. So you could technically write a Rails app on top of an SAP system. If anyone in the "start-up SV" land wants more info please let me know. There is an interesting time disruptive right now in Enterprise Software and potentially a lot of money to be had. The users are finally fighting back :)
Yes. HANA is an excellent in memory database. Business Objects is really really cool at delivering data views that look great. Netweaver is a good foundation for enterprise business solutions. SAP Portal software is as excellent of a portal as you will find.
I could also list things I don't like, but to act like a huge software company like SAP doesn't have great software is silly.
"I use SAP (in finance) and it's pretty craptacular in terms of user experience. It's generally counterintuitive and obscure."
Yes, that's what I'd argue is the worst. The user experience, and this is improving after the purchase of Business Objects. You can see this changing (finally). The problem you're mentioning isn't one of finance, or SAP, it's of R3 specifically.
R3 is a big part of SAP, so most of the complaints come from the user experience of R3. Totally valid. No doubts there.