The Oracle executive in this story is Fred Studer. The SAP person in the story is Mark Crofton. Both really nice guys. Fred and I worked together at a start up. Mark is part of the Enterprise Irregulars. But they are wary of each other. Fred offered to upgrade Mark's seating during the session. Mark claims he could not hear Fred. Would you trust Oracle when it came to upgrade talk? For that matter would you want to get closer to SAP? What to do about upgrading to Microsoft Vista?
Enterprise software upgrades, as I have written before are like refueling in mid-air. They are usually risky and they are usually low ROI. But instead of making migrations easy, most vendors are more jazzed about cool new developments, not upgrade tools and processes. No wonder for every 1X of vendor development time on a new release, the rule of thumb is 2X for the majority of the customer base to migrate. But that does not stop vendors from glossing over migration issues. Take the MISO track record (and broadly that of the software industry)
Last year SAP (and Gartner) threw a hissy fit over an Oracle ad which claimed only 4% of SAP customers had upgraded to its latest version. Oracle withrew its ads. Now SAP issues a press release basically confirming what Oracle said was true - 1,000 customers, out of its 30,000+ customers And calls it "record speed customer adoption." You want to see speed in migration go to the Serengeti. (Update: Thomas Otter of SAP comments below and on his blog that SAP is actually up to 4,000 customers which upgraded either to the 2004 or 5 version. Still only a small fraction of the customer base, but he also points to a number of tools SAP has delivered which make upgrades easier. I have asked him for a copy of an ASUG upgrade benchmark study. As I comment below I hear heavy sighs from customers when asked about the next upgrade followed by potentially more as SAP's SOA matures, but in fairness I will showcase what SAP has delivered to make testing, integration, end user retraining easier than it was 3-5-7 years ago )
In the early part of this decade, Oracle imposed a severe form of "forced march" upgrade on its application customer base as I cataloged here. Now Charles Phillips, the President assures customers the move to Oracle 12 (and PeopleSoft 9.0 and other JDE and Siebel releases) will be smoother. But I did not hear Oracle is delivering automated migration, testing and other tools to make the upgrade less manual. And seriously, when Oracle had huge quality issues with one application release 11i, much as I respect John Wookey, what are the quality risks in 5 code bases simultaneously being upgraded?
Jeff Nolan says Vista marks a turning point for Microsoft - no more 5 year, multi-zillion dollar bets. I think the light bulb went on a little earlier when they attempted to integrate Great Plains, Navision et al into something coherent. In this article Gartner thinks Vista will be a dominant corporate OS in 2010. I think that is way early to tell because it's not just Vista but Exchange and Office 2007 to also think about. Sure some Excel pivot table fan is drooling at the new features, but overall where's the ROI for all the chaos?
Unbelievably, even with 45+ software acquisitions in the last decade, IBM probably has the least controversial image with its customers when it comes to upgrades. Partly because it leaves the acquired R&D teams in place, partly because it has learned not to hype new versions too much. IBM has learned that so long as customers keep paying maintenance, why over promise and why rile them about upgrades? But if customers overpay Microsoft for the chaos, they also overpay IBM for this "peace and quiet".
Two trends are converging to challenge the MISO track record. SaaS, with its continuous, in background upgrades, is showing customers the alternative to upgrade chaos. Additionally, SaaS vendors are far closely aligned to features customers are actually using and want to be improved in the future. On, the other hand, if you want to stay with on-premise and do not want future upgrades why not use third party maintenance at a fraction of what MISO charge?
In a world of microwaves, the traditional MISO upgrade formula is too messy and takes way too long. I will take instant gumbo any day...
Update - see more on SAP upgrades here
