June, 2009

Who’s taking ERP market share from SAP, Oracle?

With Oracle’s less than stellar earnings announcement this week, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth on whether Oracle is taking market share from SAP.

Figures from Gartner Research’s most recent North American ERP market share report — which ranks the vendors through 2008 — show that doesn’t seem to be the case.

SAP’s share of the North American ERP market decreased from 28.3% in 2007 to 26.8% in 2008. In turn, Oracle’s decreased from 12.9% in 2007 to 12.7% in 2008.

SAP and Oracle are still one and two, respectively, in the North American enterprise software market by a wide margin. But in looking at these numbers, the more interesting question is, who’s taking market share from them?

Continued »

Tips for successful SAP implementations

If you haven’t seen ComputerWeekly’s reporting on what we’ll call a “difficult” SAP implementation for the Somerset County Council in the United Kingdom, it’s a worthy read.

The long and short of it is this - a more than a year long, costly SAP implementation with less than ideal go-live and upset staff members.

In fact, employees are so unnerved, they’re being offered workshops in managing excessive pressure within teams, coping strategies for abnormally high workloads and dealing with difficult situations/conversations, according to the ComputerWeekly reports.

We’ve been down this route before on SAP Watch — are go-live problems the software’s fault or the businesses’ and systems integrators’ fault?

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What does SAP’s new SaaS strategy spell for the NetSuites of the world?

On the day SAP announced its on-demand strategy, NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson, the ever-present thorn in SAP’s side, graciously took me on a walk down memory lane.

Larry Ellison, he recalled, once told him that what really helped Oracle take off was IBM announcing it was working on a relational database.

At the time, Oracle had the best database technology, and IBM acknowledging that relational databases were a big deal simply elevated Oracle’s profile, Nelson said.

And, as his story goes, Ellison said, “Someday, SAP or Microsoft will do the same thing. They’ll start talking about the importance of what you do, but won’t be able to deliver on it yet.”

SAP’s announcement of its on-demand strategy is “another IBM moment for us,” Nelson said. “The opportunity in front of us is huge. With SAP’s announcement today, everyone realizes [SaaS] is the future of software.”

And, he said, customers aren’t going to wait around for SAP to get it right.

So is SAP too late to the game? It’s no secret that SAP has struggled to get an on-demand strategy off-the-ground. Business ByDesign still isn’t fully to market yet.

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Will SAP buy Tibco?

The news that Tibco is offering cloud computing tools caught my attention this morning.

The middleware leader is getting ready to deliver a tool — Tibco Silver — for building enterprise grade applications of top of a public cloud infrastructure, according to SearchSOA.com. The applications will run on Amazon EC2 for now, but they’re planning on supporting other cloud providers in the future.

Back when Oracle bought BEA Systems, there was lots of talk about SAP perhaps buying Tibco. Bloggers and analysts engaged in loads of commentary on what SAP needed to boost its own middleware – NetWeaver — and why Tibco would make an excellent acquisition. Much of this is summed up well in this 2007 blog by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett.

In turn, a recent Forrester Research report ranked Oracle’s Fusion middleware ahead of SAP NetWeaver, touting its broader set of tools, and better support for openness and standards.

Tibco’s still available — could it bolster SAP’s middleware?

Add to that scenario the benefit to SAP’s cloud computing strategy, and Tibco’s looking good. SAP has said repeatedly that it’s trying to find a way to accommodate enterprise customers in the cloud. That’s a governance challenge that Tibco is going to tackle with Silver, Tibco’s Rourke McNamara, head of product marketing, told SearchSOA.com:

“We have been looking for a way to make the cloud useful to enterprise customers, and have talked to them about stumbling blocks such as the lack of governance, lack of portability of skill sets and code, and security.”

According to the article, Silver also features integration as a service, built on Tibco’s core service bus technology, which simplifies the process of sending and receiving data with other enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle Financials, and Siebel.

Plus, the product sounds as though it’ll be platform agnostic — the direction SAP is indicating they want to go with the cloud.

Might Tibco make a nice 2009 acquisition for SAP?