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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Warren Gates who wrote (8685)	6/26/1998 9:45:00 PM
From: J Krnjeu	Respond to of 74651

Mr. Warren Gates, <<Microsoft has been setting its eyes on the Enterprise, unfortunately, the best it could do is get a decent market share for SQL server and Windows NT. While Oracle and IBM guarded the gates, an Arian player emerged and is now the 2nd biggest independent software company in the world, about 1/3 the size of Microsoft, competing in a market that's poised to be bigger than the desktop. SAP is the name and ERP software is the game.>> SAP is not a new and up and coming company. SAP has been around for years and your are right it is a German company. SAP writes relational application software so it needs to live on a relational database. Over 85% of SAP customers use Oracle for their database. Microsoft as well as Informix and Sybase are trying to use SAP to obtain a bigger market share. This is old news. SAP has many problems. It's software is very expensive to implement. and implementation takes a long time. SAP has lost some major accounts in America to Oracle applications. SAP has tried to shorten the expense and length of time to implement their software. SAP had a major problem with Oracle. Oracle wanted to change the way they addresses objects in their database. To do this would have invalidated SAP software in Oracle 8. SAP would have to rewrite their software. SAP threaten to take Oracle to court and sue them for monopolists practices (sound familiar). SAP then threaten to stop selling and installing on Oracle. SAP then realized they would hurt themselves more than hurt Oracle, so SAP and Oracle worked out an agreement for Oracle 8. Oracle is the 2nd largest software firm. SAP America sales average around 2 billion and Oracle applications sales alone are about 1.4 billion a year. For the application vendors such as SAP, the question is how much will they be hurt once the year 2000 passes. Why would a company buy new software when it just spent an arm and a leg to fix their software for the year 2000? For a company like Oracle, the applications are just one part of their sales. They also sell database, tools and ect. As for Microsoft, when I was interviewed by their tech's for a SQL Server position, they admitted that SQL Server runs out of gas once the database grows to around 100 Gigabyte. They said they don't expect to be able to go head to head with Oracle for some years. They also said that they are writing their own applications to run on SQL Server. I see by your profile that you really like SAP. It seems to be your favorite application company. Thank you JK