Jeff Nolan of SAP in his comment below compares the Oracle/SAP campaign against each other to a political campaign - negative, but necessary. I understand his point - SAP has reason to be wary. The market is littered with Oracle roadkill - Ingres, Informix, PeopleSoft, Siebel. Oracle is wizened old political campaigner - knows how to win "elections"
But there are more political comparisons. In the sandhill podcast we did a couple of weeks ago, Erik Keller called utility IT spend "entitlements" - boy, SAP and Oracle surely get their share of that. Both have benefited richly from SOX compliance spend. Both are selling quite a bit in the government sector and protesting awards to the other. Bill McDermott of SAP and Charles Phillips of Oracle are both said to be eyeing political futures.
It will be nice to see Bill and Charles someday in Washington. We need more tech savvy folks there. But short term, they need to focus on customers. Because in software, customers have shown every decade they bring new "parties" to power. Being an incumbent is in many ways a curse in technology.
