SAP vs. Oracle, Battle Royale 147
Mark Brunelli writes "As the battle for business application supremacy heats up, Oracle users are standing by Larry Ellison and Fusion while SAP customers say NetWeaver will lead the way to victory." From the article: "Zoellner, who says he has worked with both Oracle and SAP users throughout his career, believes that the Nucleus Research study cited by deHenry is right on in its conclusion that Oracle's average three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) is 48% lower than SAP's. The business analyst said that the TCO issue is particularly important to companies in developing areas."
wow (Score:5, Interesting)
wikipedia says sap is... (Score:5, Funny)
5. Colloquially, a sap is a weak or gullible person. Also known as dupe; see confidence trick.
Re:wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Costs vary (particularly installation and configuration costs), but as a rule of thumb, if your business's income isn't enough to make your state government envious, then SAP is not for you. If all you need is a "small" installation, then you really don't need SAP.
Though I am interested in hearing what Oracle has to offer; I had thought that SAP was the only player in this field, which is why they can charge so much for such a horrible product.
Re:wow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes more effort and man hours to customise and install these products than is does to write an equivalent system inhouse, and, then you pay license fees.
The main problem is upper IT management are sold on the "we implement best practice you dont have to change anything" idea. Which collides with the
real world of "we dont do it that way here" of the business managers.
The only way to implement these products quickly and cheaply^H^H^H^H^H^H for merely outrageous cost is to implement the vanilla package and change the way the business is run to suit. This usually involves sacking/losing half your business management to force the changes through.
Re:wow (Score:1)
Re:wow (Score:1)
Fact is, there's only so much you can do with customising - it's analagous to slotting lego bricks together. You can't make settings for what isn't there - that tends to put an upper limit on how much of it you can do.
Hacking code around is more like carving your own bricks. Or just carving. There's no end to what you can create - useful or not, needed or not, justifie
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, that's such impressive FUD. Do you work for Microsoft?
My team of 12 (internal employees, not consultants) can have a freshly installed system (takes me 1 day to install) configured in under a month. You couldn't write a product in any language or tool with the same number of people in under 2 years. And even then, it would be cripped compa
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
This would only be possible in a VERY small company rollout and with absolutely no customizations, no legacy data, or legacy workflows. I guarantee you, and yes, I've done several Oracle Apps rollouts, that a company with 1000+ employees has no hope in hell of rolling out a system in anything under 6 months. The average being well over a year. The longest part of these rollouts are getting people to sign off on workflows, the tech piece is a relatively small part of it.
Re:wow (Score:1)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Oh yeah? well, my team of one can have a freshly installed system (takes me 1 day to install) configured in less than a week. Of course then the organisation spends 3+yrs fighting over business pro
Re:wow (Score:1)
Hard to blame any application vendor for that.
Re:wow (Score:2)
Wasn't blaming the vendor, just pointing out that unless you are in the extraordinarily unlikely position of having a business that lines up 100% with the vendors "best practices" installing the software is the cheap and easy part. 'Cause after that, you get to either customise the software or re-write your current busines processes. Typically it's a little from column-A and a little from column-B.
So! The point was that depending on how much or how little you
Re:wow (Score:1)
The inflexibility of SAP is a bit of a myth, to be honest. If you think installing SAP means there's only one way to do it, you're simply plain wrong. When they talk about customising, that's basically plugging a range of preprogrammed behaviours together. But it's surprising just how many variations that can give. In my experience 90% of the times SAP "can't do it" it can, b
Re:wow (Score:1)
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes more effort and man hours to customise and install these products than is does to write an equivalent system inhouse, and, then you pay license fees.
Well, it depends. Look at it this way, management is the customer. Your internal IT group is one vendor, SAP is the other. Does the customer really understand what he wants or needs? Probably not; they're focused on other areas. So as a vendor you need to have a market position -- an "elevator pitch". SAP's is pretty good: "we implement best practice you dont have to change anything". This is garbage to the developer's ears, but music to the customer's ears. What they are saying is the customer doesn't have to become an expert in the IT area, they can stick to their knitting and SAP will take care of the strategic IT direction. Lazy? Maybe. Sometimes Lazy == Efficient; knowing when this is so and not so is not a science.
The next thing on the customer's mind is risk. Can the vendor do it? Well, looking around, pretty clearly a lot of people are have some degree of success with SAP's products. Can the same be said for you? No. While it may not be your fault, clearly the vendor you work for has not solved whatever problem it is to date, so in the customer's mind you're asking for a second chance. Unless you can convince them you're not their father's IT department, forget it. What you need is the one service that as an internal vendor you're not allowed to have: marketing.
The thing that's never on the customer's mind is how much trouble it is for you. If another vendor makes the decision easy, offers apparently lower risk, then the fact it makes your life hell by making highly paid technologists do dull configuration work, well it doesn't matter. The customer would get rid of you if he could, but he can't figure how, so he may as well put you on work he understands, which is underwriting a safe bet.
Re:wow (Score:2)
Who here's ever seen a wildly successful SAP deployment in any medium to large sized company? I haven't.
I know someone who's made a second career out of consulting to a specific small companiy that wanted to "act like the big boys", on the implementation of SAP.
That person had been through the hell-on-earth that the larger company's SAP implementation had been and become over the years, so that gave them enough insight to go in and try to p
Re:wow (Score:1)
Sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. I've installed complete PeopleSoft systems, including creating DB2 and/or Oracle DB backends, in less than a day. And I'm not even a PeopleSoft guru, just a techie who did some training.
Writing a complete system, to do everything that one of these products does, would take a considerable amount of
Re:wow (Score:2)
But the projects took between three and five years to deliver and employed about 50 people each.
And as I had to use some of the front end applications I can attest to
the poor quality of the end user interface.
Speaking to the people involved more closely and listening to thier various
Re:wow (Score:2)
Translation: I'm a helpdesk monkey.
I'll go out on a limb and assume that this was in the US. That would break down as one year explaining what another country is, one explaining what another currency is, and one expla
Re:wow (Score:2)
Translation: I'm a helpdesk monkey
Actually the day job is as a middleware guru.
Various other posters have commented on the lines
of "why don't I get a job consulting on this if I know so much"
the answer is that I get paid more than a SAP consultant and
the work is much more rewarding and interesting.
Re:wow (Score:2)
Re:wow (Score:2)
>You ARE joking indeed.
Experience as a data entry clerk is still experience.
Re:wow (Score:2)
Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even at that, in the Enterprise market, where 'quality' is judged by 'longevity', Oracle's going to be at a major disadvantage.
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle had a successful ERP platform years before they bought PeopleSoft. ERP is old hat for Oracle. The recent "fusion" work is their attempt to produce a new platform to replace the now rather mature Oracle ERP platform and provide a road for their recently acquired PeopleSoft and JDE customers.
As far as TCO costs go, I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle was cheaper. The stack is, while highly proprietary, fairly streamlined compared to SAP.
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:1)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:1)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
Takes a bit more than accounting to be an ERP system.
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
a bit more than just accounting.
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:2)
They likely did have a product, but I quibble with calling it successful. We tried using Oracle's ERP platform two years ago. "Klunky" would be a compliment... ended up replacing it with an in-house product.
Admitedly it's a small sample size, but the thing was a beast and has turned off our ( remaining ) management from similar purchases.
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oracle v. SAP? Huh? (Score:1)
It's not that I didn't think of Oracle as being involved, I just figured them as more of a infrastructure/platform vendor. I've been exposed to a fair bit of Oracle stuff but it's always been in the DB/dev tools world.
SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
By contrast, SAP has a kinder, gentler work environment that is subject to Germany's rules supporting a slightly socialist economy. The German products may n
Re:SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:1)
I believe SAP has a lot of work done out of India too, exact ratio not known.
Re:SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:1)
Re:SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:1)
and to anyone who says that's a bad reason to pick a company, think of it as encouraging that sort of business practice - "mean" companies get boycotted for "nice" companies, there are less "mean" companies around
that's good, right?
Re:SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:2)
Hire a few people and pay them with your savings to do a job for you. See how far your "gentler" workplace perspec
Re:SAP : Oracle :: American Jobs : Indian Jobs (Score:1)
Never let the facts get in the way (Score:1)
http://www.oracle.com/applications/home.html/ [oracle.com]
TCO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:TCO (Score:4, Interesting)
Because everyone (i.e. including management) knows that NPVs are very uncertain thanks to all the assumptions that have to be made in order to calculate them.
As non-IT people are less familiar with TCO they are less likely to be suspicious about the numbers.
Re:TCO (Score:2)
But most companies use internal rates of 12-15%. Let's say they're weighing a $500,000 computer upgrade. Using a 12-15% number employs the fiction that they could take that $500K and invest it in a worthwhile project that would yield 12-15%, so they're computing the tradeoff of that (fictional) project vs. the up
Re:TCO (Score:1)
SAP == CRAP (Score:5, Interesting)
It might run business well, but it's hardly very extendable or flexible. Given the price you're better off writing your own system, IMO.
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:2, Insightful)
Please e-mail me your name, so I can tell our IT dept, economy dept. and human resources dept. to NEVER EVER EVER hire you or consult you or even talk to you. Please.
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1)
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:5, Interesting)
5 years ago I think this comment was valid.
Having worked in SAP for over 10 years I can partially agree with your comments. Historically SAP has been slow to adapt its central ERP system (R/3). However thats not where the battle is being fought at all - and I think you've missed the point of the article. SAP's new platform - Netweaver really isn't one single system - its a complex architecture not a single platform any more. Its this architecture that Oracle is competing against by acquiring as many of the competition as possible and then trying to integrate them into a single solution. SAP have had a smarter approach where they have mostly not bought out the competition (althought thats not the case with MDM or Toptier). SAP have instead realised about 5 years ago the direction where things were heading and I really believe they are several steps ahead of Oracle now in terms of building a full blown Enterprise Services enabled architecture. In my opinion SAP have neglected updating the central (legacy) ERP system (R/3) in favour of building an enterprise services / integration architecture around the old central product - so much so that the old legacy R/3 system isnt really central anymore - the systems around it such as business intelligence, CRM, APO, Xi, solution manager have taken a much more prominent role - and each of these new systems - whilst running on the same base kernels really are completely reworked in terms of the architecture and APIs on offer.
SAP still have a long way to go - and they could really do with reworking some of those older "hideous" code libraries - particularly on their R/3 platform. With Netweavers Enterprise service architecture - SAP looks to be truly flexible and extensible and leaving its old "hideous" code behind - and I suggest the previous poster take a read on http://sdn.sap.com/ [sap.com] for a more up to date understanding of what SAP today is all about.
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1, Insightful)
Suffering And Pain.
God how it hurts.
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1)
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:2)
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1)
Schreck Angst und Panik
or
Software Aus Pakistan.
They're using it here at work for almost everything. Looks like a relic from the stoneage (Sapgui). Impossible to support with newer software, interfaces with close to nothing.
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:3, Insightful)
Users had to print a form. They selected the form and printed it. The information was squished on the page (horizontally). After pointing out the issue and providing samples the response was, "The printouts worked in testing. We have no plans to go back and redo the forms. Have the user choose a close
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1)
Where I work we use SAP and I have to disagree with you on about everything you have to say. I input my time once a week and when a new week comes along it automatically goes to it.
If you get paid by several different funding agencies (as I was at my previous location) you have to manu
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:2)
As far as my time is concerned, the only way I can explain it is that it uses a grid to hold the information. Line 1 would have a certain funding code number for the agency which paid part of my salary. Line two would be a different funding code number for the next agency that paid part of my salary. A total of seven lines.
As far as taking leave is concerned, since each agency has a different percentage of funding allocated to it, each has
Re:SAP == CRAP (Score:1)
It may run your apps well, but it's hardly extensible or flexible. You'd be better off writing your own operating system, IMO.
Open source (Score:3, Interesting)
With so much money going into enterprise applications like SAP, why haven't we seen an open source alternative? Why wouldn't IBM, Walmart, and GM (for example) get together and create an open source version? They could share the costs with each other and smaller companies, while avoiding vendor lock-in.
The answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Only half kidding.
Re:The answer (Score:2)
Re:The answer (Score:2)
The short, utterly useless answer: (Score:3, Insightful)
A somewhat longer answer is:
It's your accounting system of record. If you're audited, that's what gets audited. IT holds your chart of accounts. It holds all data necessary to develop your Balance Sheets and P&L statements.
That's the "core" module, and both SAP and Oracle have commonalities here, with an Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and General Ledger module that is typically considered a "core" installation.
After that, you start getting complic
Re:The short, utterly useless answer: (Score:1)
I think it's not so much that open source couldn't, but it just wouldn't want to. Accounting is boring - it's not even mathematically interesting - and all this double entry nonesense sounds very inefficient. Business majors are so square. Sales is for teh luz3rz in 5uitz.
What would 99.999% of geeks rather do - research
Re:The answer (Score:2)
If you are still half kiding, I am completely serious. As far as I can see, SAP sells the same customization capacity of gcc. It can become anything, and so, it needs a complete program to become something.
The reason you don't see some open source SAP is because FOSS people don't have a marketing department, so they normaly create software that in fact does something, or follow the specs and write a compiler.
Well, ok there is a big library with the SAP package (the framework thing), but those we have at F
Re:Open source (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open source (Score:2, Insightful)
TCO (Score:2)
Re:TCO Why no open source alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Its too risky for a big corporation or organisation to develop one... You would need auditor sign offs etc.
No, this is no different from any business software. ERP is just lots of little packages working together to organise a business.
And the Oracle and SAP systems are top end...
Only in the sense of "big money". The actual software itself is bottom end. As pretty much anybody who's used it will tell you.
for large organisations milllions of transactions a day. Scaleable systems at that size are not built quickly
FUD. Google, with one of the largest setups on the planet, uses open source software and doesn't seem to have any trouble. Scalability is just a design issue. Like everything else.
and people want to have a vendor to blame.
Sigh, more FUD. I'm quite sure that there are plenty of open source companies that would be happy to step up to the plate for an extremely good value maintenance contract (by SAP/Oracle standards) for any set of software a business wanted.
There are legal issues as well to ensure Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II compliance.
No different from any piece of business software.
I have tried to get my company to look at building an open source System to replace Peoplesoft instead of Fusion... but there is no interest.
At your company.
Open source ERP is potentially a large investment that could take a while to get payback on but it is also an area that could be done incrementally. There are a number of open source workflow packages that could form the nucleus of an ERP and there are many open source packages that could be adapted to perform various ERP functions. I'd suggest open source companies interested in this area pick some element of the ERP puzzle and specialise in it. By using open standards your software can then work with other ERP specialists and cover a larger part of the ERP space.
If anyone does want to start one though - Im in !
Glad to hear it.
A big hurdle an open source ERP package would face is to find a businesses where the software could be tested in real life. Very few businesses would be willing to risk their core processes on something untested. Again though, it could all be done incrementally. Likely to be more cost effective and safer than many "big bang" SAP conversions.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers [wikipedia.org] fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD [wikipedia.org] too.
Re:TCO Why no open source alternative (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool! Where can I download the sources for PageRank, their database schema, and their search front end?
Seriously, while you make some good points regarding the viability of building an OSS Enterprise app suite, I see two pitfalls to this approach:
Re:TCO Why no open source alternative (Score:1)
> Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting > company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
For this to be true, somebody would have to be trying to influence somebody of importance and think that astroturfing Slashdot is the right way to do it. If so, these people would come from one of two categories:
(i) Fanatical Support: ("I love Apple! I worship my suite of Apple products every night!") which is
I've been there for a 1:1 comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Where it was let down was in the procurement and maintenance sections... where BOTH sucked fetid dingo kidneys.
That was 3-4 years ago now.. so I hope Oracle have picked up their game....
Article makes no sense, unless... (Score:4, Insightful)
Battle Royale (Score:1, Funny)
Above the numbers (Score:5, Funny)
Those projects are so incredibly expensive, I have no idea what kind of scale they use to calculate the TCO. Teradollars? I can imagine a board meeting (CIO: "Hey guys, we must make room for 317 Teradollars in the next budget for this SAP thingy. So I guess we'll have to forget about the Winzip licenses for now.").
Seriously, a friend of mine is convinced that SAP is part of a secret plan to crush the western economy.
Re:Above the numbers (Score:2)
But all we hear about is SAP projects that failed - we hardly/never hear of any successful ones. I've been doing software rollouts for PeopleSoft/Oracle for 4 years now, and I can tell you that while Oracle's product may have a lower TCO, it's usability su
Oracle's lower TCO's reported against SAP (Score:3, Insightful)
All the modules can be individually customized and presented to the customer for his choosing whenever he wants to use that part of the package.
No, it's not a battle royale, Fusion, never was and will never come close to where SAP is in the market today.
High Costs!?!
What's that, do you say a piece of code is costly just because it initially costs higher!?
Have you ever worked in a company where SAP was implemented, do some costing for such a company and then come back and post on the cost savings they've had in their departments after implementing SAP, yes a few implementations do go pear shaped but this is generally not the case.
I don't know about Zoellner's previous jobs but certainly can't find anything on google relating him to know anything that he claims to know about SAP.
(Disclaimer: I'm an SAP Tech. Consultant)
(home: http://alternateplanet.net/ [alternateplanet.net] )
(blog: http://alternateplanet.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] )
Silly Arguments (Score:3, Interesting)
Further, let's just drop all this OSS nonsense. I believe it would take 10+ years of development for anyone to seriously consider it. Let's say you develop a system. Who is trained on it? What major companies have successfully run it?
Look how long it's taken Linux to gain acceptance, and Linux is something you can incorporate one server at a time. To move your whole company over to a new database system is not something anyone wants to do unless there's a proven, stable solution. This is just one of those areas where OSS can't compete effectively IMO. OSS isn't the answer to every question, as much as some would like it to be.
Re:Silly Arguments (Score:1)
This is especially true with Oracle. As it aggressively purchases other products, like People Soft, I expect efforts made to increase scale and extend compatibility between product lines. One of the simplest ways to extend compatibility without creating a ton of other issues is to extend the API
Re:Silly Arguments (Score:2)
Open Source's Big Weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source doesn't work well when the problem domain is an area that few techie developers have knowledge of. Then you need to bring in experts in the required area of expertise who have the time and motivation to contribute to an Open Source solution. Now this does happen, but it's much rarer. Take my employer. We produce engineering modeling design software for cellular mobile telephone networks. Our development team includes a group of very knowledgeable and experienced radio network engineers who do testig and write specs and requirements, include experts in 3G radio technology of which there are not many in the whole world. Without their contributions over the last decade, our software wouldn't be possible. You see a similar thing happening with computer games, which require a considerable, high-quality contribution of art assets.
Techies have an innate interest in developing technological solutions to problems - if they have an itch it's likely to be a technical one and they are likely to want to develop technical methods of scratching it, which often means software. Artists, radio engineers and specialists from many other disciplines such as accountancy, human resources, etc don't have the same compulsion to develop or contribute towards software based solutions to their problems. It seems to me that corporate integration platforms like those offered by SAP and Oracle fall into the same category. They aren't the sort of problem you average techie is likely to feel any compulsion to solve, and those specialists you'd need to have involved in the development process aren't likely to be interested in doing so. This is where heavy ammounts of corporate funding is required to bridge the gap.
Now of course this doesn't exclude OSS from the party. For example groups of companies could collaborate to fund an OSS solution to their common problem, but these are likely to be competing companies. We're talking about huge investments of cash here, invested over time spans of 5 to 10 years or more. I think OSS will eventualy start to penetrate into these areas as the software industry matures but I expect this will happen over the long term, like my lifetime for example.
Simon Hibbs
Our SAP Installation (Score:1)
New markets (Score:2, Insightful)
Both products were built on a classic client-server model. A single central server supplies data and function. In a really large institution (think Army, VA, etc.) the central server cannot provide the performance needed.
Both Oracle and SAP are going after this type customer now and that is driving some of the changes.
Smalle
So much fud (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that SAP is a complex beast. I've been working with it, both developing and administering, for about 12 years now. I have no experience with Oracle's ERP product (though I am an Oracle DBA), but I'm sure it's just as sizeable. The issue with most "failed" SAP implementations that I'm aware of, and there have been many, is this - incompetence. Incompetence abounds in the technology industry. It's not isolated to SAP, either. I routinely interview job candidates for Oracle DBA positions, SAP Basis Administration positions, SAP BW Developer positions, and SAP ABAP developer positions. I find one very common thread among the candidates - very few of them know what they're talking about. If you hire them, either as an employee, or as a consultant, and they are the senior technical people on your implementation project, you are bound to fail. Whether it's implementation of the ERP product itself, or an implementation of new functionality. That's not SAP's fault, it's yours.
In the end, the decision to go with Oracle or SAP should be based upon which product fits best in your environment, if either of them do. Interfaces are a significant part of this decision, and both SAP and Oracle have their strengths which need to be evaluated and prioritized. Supportability is, as well. If you are not willing to pay your senior developers and support staff more than $100K per year to maintain the product, then don't bother, you will likely fail. If the evaluation is done well, and the implementation is managed well, and you take care to hire the right people and retain them, then you will succeed.
Re:So much fud (Score:2)
Random thoughts on Oracle (And ERP in general) (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm an Oracle Applications Consultant (DBA) that specializes in performing (and supporting) the implementation and upgrade of the "Oracle E-Business Suite" (or "Oracle Applications" or "Oracle Financials" as the name has evolved over a number of years).
I first got involved with this product in 1993 when it was on "Release 9". I believe it originated 5-10 years earlier. This product has been around for quite some time.
In the early/mid 90's, as another poster mentioned, moving o
An old saying (Score:2)
From the empirical evidence I've seen, this saying exists for a reason.
Re:An old saying (Score:2)
I really did preview that, man; I swear to God I did.
Three-year TCO (Score:2)
1. Decided to stop using an outsourced system for e-commerce and back-end stuff
2. Blew millions of bucks on a content-management/app-development framework
Oracle Financials (Score:1)
Re:The way to Victory (Score:1)
Hardware: The Nuts and Volts of News for Nerds.
Linux: Don't fear the Penguins.
Politics: Politics for Nerds. Your vote matters.
Re:The way to Victory (Score:1, Funny)
Re:The way to Victory (Score:2)
Re:The way to Victory (Score:2)
Re:The way to Victory (Score:1)