Jeff,
I realize that your question was directed to Michelle but I thought I would take a stab in answering your question about Oracle applications if that's okay.
I believe the slump in Oracle applications is due to several reasons.
1. PSFT and SAP beat Oracle to market with a GUI applications package. While SAP and PSFT was showing point and click and nice graphics to senior executives, Oracle was still showing their character base applications. While I still believe that character base applications beats GUI hands down for data entry, character base looks old. Regardless of the functionality, senior managers liked the graphics.
2. Oracle, in an effort to respond to SAP and PSFT, rapidly devloped their graphical applications. They originally called them 10G but later changed them to 10SC. Oracle, in perhaps a bit of a hurry to get these applications to market, may have rushed them slightly. They were extremely buggy and cumbersome to work with. Oracle has done a tremendous job in the last several years to make these applications stable (they have many customers who are live and happy with SC), however I believe that the word of their initial problems got out to potential customers. It definitley got out to current Oracle customers. In fact, I heard several days ago that 70% of Oracle customers are still using the character applications. There are several reasons that is in addition to the one above (1) the character apps with unix are quick and just plain work (2) Client/Server (10SC)is expensive to maintain. Since the forms reside on the client side (the users PC), every time you apply a patch to a form, you must apply it to every users PC. Multiply this by 500 users and the maintenance is tremendous.
(3) PSFT, SAP, and BAAN have done a great job in taking market share. You have to give these three credit. PSFT owned the HR applications market. In fact of my 30 or so clients over the past 8 years, I would say that at least half had PSFT human resource applications or were in the process of implementing them. This gave them an existing customer base and the ability to win customers on the strength of their HR apps. And they have developed some good financials functionality to complement their HR apps. They have recently released their distribution and Manufacturing products which have helped as well. I remember when SAP would not even talk to you unless you wanted to implement the entire suite of applications. However, over the past several years, SAP realized before Oracle that applications growth would be coming from mid-sized companies since most of the Fortune 500 had already implemented applications. They cut the price of their apps to make them affordable to smaller companies and let companies implement the modules they wanted. While SAP is extremly complex and somewhat time consuming to implement, their international functionality is superior. Since they are a German company and within 1000 miles there may be 4 languages and 4 currencies, they could not design their applications with only Germany in mind. It is a truly global package. Oracle has focused on improving in this area in recent releases and have done a good job with their mulit-org functionality and globalizations/ regionalizations modules.
Now having said all this, I am extremely optimistic about the future of Oracle's applications. My current client is implementing Release 10.7 NCA on Oracle NT. We have found the NCA piece (I wish I could say the same for NT) to be very stable with just a few problems. I truly believe that this is the future. By placing the client piece on a webserver, maintenance will be applied only once to the client. The users PC will simply have a Java applet which will allow them to connect to the webserver. While I have not personally used Release 11 of the applications, I have talked to Oracle developers and read documentation on the new functionality. Based on what I have read and heard, I believe they are headed in the right direction. Also the integration partnership with Richter today was good news. Oracle has always been weak from a retail standpoint and this will help tremendously.
I want to apologize to everyone on the length of this post. I tried to make it as short as possible. I feel like I left a lot out.
Thanks all,
Mark |
