I had a few dealing with SAP when I worked for Oracle, and I have a cousin at IBM who deals with them on a regular basis. I always found them inflexible and the engineers to be less than stellar, but I was never positive that I was getting a fair picture. Despite that, I jumped to the conclusion that the reason SAP was alway beating Oracle in apps was that Oracle wasn't serious about it, and when, a few years ago, Oracle started getting serious, I expected them to overtake SAP. I'm not impartial, since I still own Oracle stock, but I think that articles like the one in the WSJ recently are signs that SAP is struggling against Oracle. And if SAP is as inflexible and insular as they seemed to me, they will have a very tough time competing by acquisitions -- they'll buy things and then all of the best engineers will quit instead of trying to deal with the people at the head office. By contrast, when Oracle bought PSFT, Oracle got rid of lots of Oracle engineers that weren't good enough, but they left the PSFT engineers alone (I heard from database engineers at Oracle that the PSFT engineers were much better than the Oracle apps people that got let go, and the DB guys were quite pleased about the improvement).
It should be interesting... |
