

Tesla builds its own backend to replace SAP - memracom
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/11/01/how-elon-musk-approaches-it-at-tesla/

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WestCoastJustin
Entire post @
[http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=...](http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.wsj.com%2Fcio%2F2013%2F11%2F01%2Fhow-
elon-musk-approaches-it-at-
tesla%2F&ei=Ng94UujGIoTKrQGxjoGgCQ&usg=AFQjCNEcbHif9vCToTtcx94GmEQzfJj_og&bvm=bv.55819444,d.aWM&cad=rja)

p.s. when I visited this link it only showed me a short preview, but if you
come in via a google, it shows the entire thing.

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memracom
Some news sites only show the full article if you come to an article from an
approved partner. In this case if you google for this text:

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk decided that the company would build its own
business software

and then click on the link, then you will see the full article. Sorry for the
problems.

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chollida1
This is all I see...

> Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk decided that the company would build its own
> business software to run the company. CIO Jay Vijayan and his team built it
> in just four months.

Is this really the entire post?

~~~
chollida1
Wow a down vote for asking an honest question. Someone's a bit cranky today.

For anyone else who only got a gist like me just take the url and put it into
google and follow the link. This seems to skip what ever sort of paywall the
article is behind.

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eyepulp
Anyone know if there's any more substantive info about what their tech stack
looks like? I wouldn't expect all the details, but something more than "we did
it, and it's not SAP, and it's totally web-scale" would be pretty interesting
to read.

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davidiach
They just saved a lot of money.

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fourmii
Wow, what an article! Here it is, don't bother clicking:

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk decided that the company would build its own
business software to run the company. CIO Jay Vijayan and his team built it in
just four months.

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programminggeek
ERP systems tend towards the terrible because you end up either throwing your
existing systems on the ground, or you are going to need to rewrite the vendor
system to match the systems you already have in place.

Anymore, I think it would be a lot smarter/cheaper to have a bunch of REST/RPC
api's exposed in front of your data systems and just wire a bunch of UI on top
of those instead of having to rewrite a system like SAP to do what you need it
to do.

Also, how is it that large enterprises like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon,
etc. can scale to millions/billions of users using a similar API-driven
approach and a company of tens of thousands couldn't do the same thing for
their ERP system that probably has < 100,000 users on it?

~~~
chollida1
> Also, how is it that large enterprises like Google, Facebook, Twitter,
> Amazon, etc. can scale to millions/billions of users using a similar API-
> driven approach and a company of tens of thousands couldn't do the same
> thing for their ERP system that probably has < 100,000 users on it?

Business rules. Google clientel basically all use the same api to ask the same
question.

SAP users have, I'm guessing, 2 -3 orders of magnitude more differences and
rules that a google user does.

This is a 100 billion dollar business where almost every company on the face
of the earth can be a client so it attracts some very smart people.

The huge differences from company to company make it really tough to have one
product scale out for everyone. SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, Microsoft and many
others have tried and the fact that no one has done it yet speaks to how
difficult it is to do.

