Great quote from Tom Foydel, ex Oracle now a NetSuite reseller and a fellow Irregular, as he asks "Does Oracle fear NetSuite?".
He concludes they live in very different worlds and that "Oracle is too big to make it down the staircase".
I suspect Juergen Rottler, EVP Customer Services at Oracle would disagree. At Oracle OpenWorld, he mentioned that in the last year, Oracle has grown from 1.7 million to 3.6 million on-demand users and that Oracle University has trained 350,00o students on-line. It certainly understands how to run a large scale SaaS operation.
In that sense, Oracle is ahead of SAP as it rolls out its BBD and builds its own SaaS infrastructure (versus leveraging the experiences and infrastructure of its partners). It has not gone through the joys of setting up data centers, managing thousands of SLA driven customers, or tried to manage Wall Street nervousness on the large CAPEX appetite of SaaS.
What neither Oracle or SAP are really ready for though - the scenario of Champagne Tastes but Beer Pocket Money Budgets Wait till the Tuxedo and Champagne crowd figure out what Brown Shoes and Beer crowd are paying for roughly similar functionality.
Then Jeff Foxworthy's 12 days of Christmas will look pretty real...
