@tommorris oh, my fun days working on business integration challenges as an IT consultant back in the day. There was a particularly fun retail system that involved squirting XML directly into a TCP socket (with no confirmation, and it could terminate the connection when it felt like it). Sorry, I know your rant is SAP specific! But yes, many such annoying things out there in the wild. This is where software businesses build services businesses (see also: Salesforce IBM Oracle et al)