The Pot and the Kettle

Jeff Nolan of SAP complains about Oracle's advertising and Gartner slaps Oracle's wrist for misrepresenting its research in the ad. I am surprised this did not come up when Oracle announced its OFF SAP program in June. I guess it was mostly press releases back then - this time it was a full page WSJ ad.

Jeff points out Gartner/Forrester/AMR research about Oracle's own migration issues in the past. I have written before - about Oracle's 11i quality issues when it was introduced and about its "forced march" of 10.7 customers to the unstable release. I have also written about Oracle's risks as it plans an even more ambitious migration of PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel and other customer bases to Fusion.

But ...SAP does not have that much to be proud about either. The industry's track record with migrations is pretty poor as I wrote in Of Serengeti and Software Migrations. Many clients have told me they cannot afford to upgrade to mySAP. And they resent having to pay SAP a premium to stay on the older versions - when they know SAP has been moving its labor to lower cost countries and maintenance is almost 90% margin.

I know several customers that are looking to get off SAP maintenance and bring it in-house or have cheaper third party options support them. Just like Oracle customers are looking at lower maintenance from TomorrowNow - ironically, owned by SAP.  Software maintenance from both vendors is overpriced.

Instead of running ads and complaining about each other both SAP and Oracle should be listening to their own customer bases. Or they will both have a large bar called "lost customers" in future bar graphs...

PS - Here is the link to the ad in question on the Oracle site

PPS: Friday, Dec 23 - Oracle appears to have taken the ad image off the page referenced above on its site in the last couple of days.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

When a certain SAP flagship customer was approached to do the upgrade to mySAP, the 'preferential cost estimate' was a mere 5% - $10 million. The CTOs response could best be described as 'colorful.'

Another flagship SAP site had an option, wait for SAP or integrate and reduce the number of instances by an order of magnitude. Guess what they did?

When the mother of all upgrades happened with Oracle at 10.6>10.7>11, their customers had to re-hire a ton of Oracle consulting folk as contractors almost overnight after Oracle decided on a quick head count reduction. Just before their European user conference of a few years ago.

Those attendees were livid at what they saw as lies being told by execs. Harsh but true.

But those customers keep buying Vinnie. And that's the issue. They're members of the various 'clubs' Oracle and SAP have established - in effect, they're ring fenced to a degree.

Because at the end of the day Oracle BDMs and SAP engineers know that in broad terms, it's a job for life. And no-one - at least in SAPs chosen markets - is going to step out of line and become a headline basket case.

Crazy though it sounds, I don't see that changing anytime soon. It needs a different set of thought processes in senior positions.

You of course may know better.

[Vinnie Mirchandani]

Dennis, that's how it would appear but tech customers have long memories. We still say you never get fired for buying IBM but IBM was in deep trouble a decade ago. years of customer unhappiness finally caught up. CA had to clean up its act. Will not happen tomorrow but at least in my sample of customers there is considerable frustration with both vendors.