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.
