For the last few years SAP and Oracle have provided a series of entertaining "who is more black" episodes. And while they mock each other, SaaS vendors have continued to flourish, and newer categories of social media and vertical vendors have emerged. And corporations have tipped the buy/build equilibrium back towards custom build.
But now, as Ben Worthen points out, IBM/HP may become the new Pot/Kettle: " IBM will upsell even more services, Svinte wrote in his email. He rattles off a laundry list of acronyms and buzz words like Managed Business Process Outsourcing that he says IBM offers and H-P doesn’t."
Hush - don't tell either they only have 15% services market share between themselves. As with SAP and Oracle, let innovation happen elsewhere - as in cloud computing. And don't tell them CIOs have started to hire more and build more internal capability.
But don't tell them so we can look forward to entertaining comments from both.
I better line up other translations for Pot-Kettle having used the German, French, Spanish and Hungarian ones for the SAP-Oracle series :)
