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 :)
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 :)