I am stealing words about silliness from my friend, Bob Evans as he recounts here Larry Ellison's comments about competitors during the recent Oracle earnings call.
Larry was particularly vocal about SAP's vulnerability. My response to SAP competitors (many whisper more than scream like Oracle does), when they say that is: "Tell me exactly why?"
There are over a million SAP, Oracle, Infor, IFS, Unit4, Epic, Cerner and other legacy application customers. They are all "vulnerable". Have been for a decade. None of the vendors has shown much momentum moving their on-premise customers to next- gen. The cloud competition has not delivered knockout punches. They are narrow in reach - don't cover operational areas. Besides, the cost of migrating to a completely new platform, with little automation, with the need to retrain users on the new UX and IT on the new architecture is daunting. Show me how you are making it compelling to move SAP customers. If anything I see a bit of the reverse. I see SAP's broad range of applications and customers looking at application portfolio rationalization. They are looking to reverse a decade of "ring fencing" their ERP with best of breed cloud applications.
Also, I see SAP with plenty of assets to turn the tables against the competition. It has a dominant Asia-Pac presence. I wrote after an event in Bangkok "SAP has been in Asia over 30 years and now has over 9,000 employees spread across 31 office in the region. The event in Bangkok showed me just how far the competition has to go to catch up." With all the musical chairs in the executive suite at many CRM vendors in the last few weeks I get the sense that market is poised for disruption. SAP's CX portfolio, especially the Commerce piece, and with new leadership under Bob Stutz, will get another shot. The SAP Analytics Cloud keeps growing in reach and maturity as I wrote here. The recent "Microsoft Embrace" opens up support of the vast Microsoft channel, and also simplifies the hyperscaler choice for many undecided customers (while keeping open support for customer loads on AWS, Google and Alibaba clouds).
Yes, SAP has had plenty of executive turnover this year. However, as I recently told a journalist "Not just Jen and Christian, the exciting thing to me is how young SAP management is now, yet how technologically and globally sophisticated." Show me a vendor which has not had changes at the top in the last year or so - in different ways, Oracle, Infor, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Unit4 all have. The turnover in their customer tech teams and budgets is even more dramatic. And that has opened the door for many new competitors
I wrote recently "In the last decade, we have seen Google and Facebook run away with digital advertising spend. Amazon has commoditized order taking and fulfillment functionality by offering it as a service to millions of SMEs. Foxconn, Flex and design shops have taken over contract manufacturing as products of every stripe get smarter with embedded technology, GE, ABB, Rockwell and others are getting the lion's share of IoT generated revenues. None of the major enterprise application vendors have seen much revenue from any of these markets. And in industries like financial services, many customers are back to custom building and even becoming vendors in their own right."
Tongue-in-cheek, I had sent a copy of SAP Nation 3.0 to the editors with the sub-title of "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king". Looking at the last few years, I had been taken aback at how little its direct competition had grown and taken advantage of SAP's challenges.
So here's my question: if SAP is vulnerable, what would you call its current crop of competitors?
