Dennis Howlett reporting from Australia picks up on worries about Oracle DB costs in SAP customers. For the 20 years I have dealt with SAP customers, it has been a line item in their TCO spreadsheet, but the accounting is often convoluted because the Oracle DB license usually covers more than the SAP implementation. And if the SAP project decides to use a different DB, the enterprise adds another line item and is still left with amortizing the Oracle costs on some other projects.
Also, it is only one line item. In many customers, other cells stand out a lot more on the SAP TCO spreadsheet
They include
- SAP’s own license cost
- SAP’s own annual maintenance
- Accenture (or other SI) global implementation project
- Infosys (or other outsourcers) application maintenance costs
- EMC Storage
- IBM (or other hosting firm) data center charges
- Internal SAP staff and training costs
- Verizon (or other carrier) MPLS costs
- Major upgrade projects
Let’s face it, SAP customers Down Under and everywhere have plenty of cells to shine their spotlight on.
