Oracle''s Lane Sees ERP slowdown
crn.com
By Shawn Willett
Redwood Shores, Calif.
6:48 PM EST Tues., Nov. 03, 1998
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Oracle Corp.'s President Ray Lane said that the ERP market has indeed slowed, but there are still opportunities for large growth rates in the supply chain management and front office applications.
"We are in a transition place of what has been ERP," said Lane who added that the high growth rates of years past were due to Year 2000 problems and other issues. "It was an irrational market, no one thought it was going to continue to grow at 70 percent a year."
Lane, speaking at Oracle's Data Warehousing Day at the company's headquarters here, added that only mid-size and smaller companies are still buying ERP applications to solve Y2K issues.
However, the real growth will be in ERP applications that are not core, such as supply chain management and front office.
Supply chain management involves syncing up a company's internal applications with suppliers and others. Front office applications include sales force automation and other end user ERP tools.
"It will still be a slower rate of growth because you don't have Y2K pushing up sales," he said.
Lane said that he does not believe that Y2K issues will affect the implementation of data warehousing projects, which can run in the millions of dollars.
"Data warehousing is relatively inexpensive...and we are able to show an immediate return on investment," said Lane.
Oracle executives at the event said that data warehousing projects account for between 35 to 50 percent of Oracle's sales.
In a related matter, Lane said that SQL Server 7 would force pricing pressure on some segments of the market.
"If you want a fundamental relational SQL database, that will absolutely be under pricing pressure...but Oracle8i takes it way beyond that," said Lane.
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