Earlier in week, when SAP announced plans to buy BusinessObjects, Oracle fans said "see, SAP is validating our acquisition strategy". Today, when Oracle announced plans to buy a compliance vendor, SAP fans said "Oracle is copying SAP's success in that market category".
Both SAP and Oracle, so fixated on each other, should cuddle up with a copy of the latest Software Magazine 500 listing issue out today (subscribe here). It will sober them. Together, they make up just 7% of the total 500 revenues of $ 394 billion. Larry Ellison's grand industry consolidation plan and investment budget has yielded him a whopping 2 % increase in market share over the last few years. While they continue to narrowly define "software", the issue shows systems integrators and outsourcers increasing market share in the 500 as they write massive amounts of custom code and through BPO take over entire processes and the code needed to run them.
As usual the issue is chock full of industry data and trends. Example: the fastest growing software segments (with staffing as growth metric) are search/portal, messaging/communications, security, wireless/mobile, HR/workforce management.
Good to see the industry alive and well...and spreading into so many new categories.
