Have you been watching the FIFA World Cup? I have been watching highlights. And peeks at an occasional game on Fox Sports Go. It’s humbling to think I will likely watch less than 1% of the 96 Group Stage games and maybe just a bit more of the games in the elimination rounds. Then I got a demo from Remiqz, which has analytics on soccer players – down to individual touches, strength of opponent and other metrics, and it was even more humbling. In the game today against Iran, the Spanish team had 720 passes. Impressive but well short of the record 993 passes Barcelona had in a Champions League game. Their database has analysis on thousands such games.
We live in a world of instant analysis which is summarization of staggering amount of little touch points. I was thinking about that when I read two stories this morning in our industry – one about SAP, the other about Oracle.
Teradata has filed a legal complaint against SAP claiming it “stole Teradata’s trade secrets (accumulated by Teradata over the course of four decades in the EDAW space), and used them to quickly develop and introduce a competing (though inferior) product: SAP HANA.” and “Upon release of its new product, SAP promptly terminated the parties’ joint venture, and it is now attempting to coerce its customers into using HANA only, to the exclusion of Teradata, by forcing its customers to adopt HANA in exchange for upgrading their ERP Applications. “
The period covered in the complaint goes back a decade. Having being involved in a few software cases as an expert witness, I started thinking how attorneys are likely to strategize.
Will SAP argue Oracle and Microsoft have long used proprietary databases in their application stacks and SAP decided with S/4HANA it was more efficient to do same? Will Teradata cite Indirect Access examples where SAP threatened customers who wanted to move transaction data out of ECC to analyze or for third party apps to access? Will SAP argue that with Business Objects, Sybase, TREX, MaxDB and other products it had plenty of its own analytical IP and talent?
Then I stopped. In a jury trial, appeals to lay person emotion often factor more than technical arguments. But the discovery process will involve looking at lots of data going back at least a decade or more. They cannot do instant analysis, they have to watch “lots and lots of tape”
I thought of that again when I saw “Oracle ORCL, +0.07% reported revenue and earnings beats Tuesday afternoon, but Wall Street’s enthusiasm for the numbers was fleeting. Oracle stopped breaking out its cloud business in its official earnings numbers, as it had previously, which led many to question whether the company was hiding something after slowing cloud growth had hurt the stock in previous quarters.”
JP Morgan had downgraded Oracle stock a few days prior based on “a survey of 154 chief information officers (which) revealed Oracle received the most indications for "spending contraction" this year. “
154 customers surveyed? Oracle has 430,000. I was also struck by a comment that “CIOs have clarified that they are migrating Oracle databases to Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon databases and PostgreSQL” What about moves to HANA? SAP claims 23,000 HANA customers. Does the JP Morgan database have SAP customers?
Reality is all of us sample and want instant analysis. It is useful periodically to step back and consider the volume of little touch points. Another reason I write a book every year or so. It forces me to go back and look at lots of historical tape. Mercifully, not every team has 993 passes each game.
