The Enterprise System Spectator

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

SAP slams Oracle's strategy as, Project Confusion

Sparks continue to fly this week between Oracle and SAP. The latest flame is from Leo Apotheker, SAP's president for global field operations:

Commenting on Oracle's product development roadmap whereby it aims to bring together the best from the Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards application suites in a single product currently known as Fusion, he said: "I'm not sure if fusion is the right word, maybe it should be confusion. No one has succeeded in combining four code bases into one."

Apotheker compared Oracle's strategy to that of Microsoft, which plans to merge the code base for its four separate enterprise system offerings into one new product, code named Project Green. That effort has been delayed as Microsoft has found it a bigger job than it envisioned. SAP, no doubt, hopes that Oracle will face similar difficulties.

Apotheker also contrasted SAP's service oriented architecture, branded Netweaver, to what he called Oracle's "data centric view." A service-oriented architecture allows different software products to interoperate, based on open web services standards. Oracle has been slow to embrace such a view, encouraging customers to implement Oracle's E-Business Suite, over a single database instance, throughout the organization, making such interoperability unnecessary. Interestingly, just prior to its takeover by Oracle, PeopleSoft had embraced a service oriented architecture in its product roadmap. Those plans, of course, are now scuttled.

Computer Business Review has more on Apotheker's comments.

Related posts
Ellison outlines direction for PeopleSoft and JDE product lines
Microsoft slowing down Project Green
Oracle's new reseller strategy and speculation on the future of JDE
Microsoft to put enterprise applications on the auction block?
Microsoft eats more humble pie in enterprise software business
Pass the Kleenex (regarding SAP's complaint that Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft was leading to pricing pressure)

by Frank Scavo, 2/16/2005 06:54:00 PM | permalink | e-mail this!

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