Sure as the sun rises in the east, Larry Ellison tweaked SAP in his OOW keynote on Sunday. And sure as you are born, SAP fans are up in arms.
Honestly, what should bother SAP fans more is he waited so long (see 42:00 in video below) to talk about HANA. He picked on Salesforce.com and Amazon and Workday way more and way earlier. What message is that when both SAP and Oracle are emphasizing clouds?
What should bother SAP is it does not (yet) have slides which can match the 49 marketing, 113 service, 47 industry specific and many other cloud apps Larry talked about. That its own data centers have a small fraction of the 400 petabytes Oracle claims to host in its data centers. SAP is the world’s largest enterprise apps vendor – but that does not seem to bother it. But take a shot at HANA, and SAP Nation goes crazy. Shows how far SAP has pivoted even as its customers faithfully send it billions a year in maintenance dollars to invest in applications.
In another thread, John Appleby at Bluefin, a SAP partner tweeted about my forthcoming book on the SAP economy “Do you think that you can offer an objective perspective when your sponsors are SAP's competitors? Seems ethically tricky.”
He said that without access to a preview copy. He has not read the book which has perspectives from over a hundred SAP customer executives, analysts, alums and even current executives. It has data from 25 years of archives. It is balanced – explains the rocket ship that was SAP in the 1990s, and the many failures in its economy. It does root cause analysis and presents a wide range of SAP customer coping strategies.
John speculates about what SAP’s competitors may have told me. For the record, I spoke to several of SAP’s competitors for the book. Most were generous to SAP, when they could have easily thrashed it. Many I ended up quoting from press sources and events – and there where they emphasize their differentiation. They did not jump at the opportunity to give me any specific dirt about SAP. Frankly, it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the industry that these executives chose to not go negative.
I wish SAP would quit being obsessed with what its competitors say. It’s success and its problems have little to do its competitors. In the book, I have a “small” section on this obsession.
You get the sense Oracle has worked its way under SAP’s skin. It’s Melville’s Captain Ahab and Moby Dick all over again. While the whale was fearsome, many readers would say Ahab was actually the villain with his relentless obsession and reckless use of his ship and crew in chasing the whale.
But that is a side bar. Most of the book is about conversations with SAP customers. After reading the book, I expect SAP fans like John will continue to question my “ethics”.
My hope is they listen to what SAP’s customers told me, not worry about what its competitors may be saying or not.
