August, 2009

Will Rimini Street, and third-party support, be drawn into Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP?

Oracle’s demand for Rimini Street to give it information in its lawsuit against SAP wasn’t the only development in the SAP vs. Oracle saga last week.

Oracle also filed more allegations in the case - filing a fourth amended complaint that attempts to make Siebel and Oracle’s database technology part of the lawsuit.

Oracle now alleges that SAP extended TomorrowNow’s illegal business model to Siebel just days after Oracle completed the acquisition. It also says that TomorrowNow’s environments ran on copies of Oracle database software that weren’t licensed for commercial or production use, according to court documents. SAP refused to purchase Oracle database licenses for TomorrowNow’s use, “even though as an authorized Oracle database reseller, they knew full well the permissible uses of database copies,” the document states.

Oracle certainly hasn’t been shy about piling on the charges in this lawsuit - amending its original complaint four times over the past two years. One now has to wonder what this means for Rimini Street, and whether it will now be dragged into this lawsuit.

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As Oracle’s day in the Sun inches closer, SAP continues to sunblock

This week, Oracle took a step closer to offering the McDonald’s value meal of the tech world - the U.S. Justice Department giving the green light to a deal with Sun that will have Oracle selling “hamburger, fries and a soda” software/hardware packages to companies.

There’s still the matter of the European Union’s OK - which is being held up by concerns over Java, middleware and databases, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the WSJ also reports that the Justice Department’s OK is an encouraging sign that the EU’s approval isn’t far behind.  

Meanwhile, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has been making it very clear over the past few weeks, in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, that SAP has no intention of following the Sun.

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What SAP product or service would make your life easier?

One of the more interesting questions during last week’s “Does IT Matter” forum in Boston came from AMR Research’s Bruce Richardson, who asked the panelists if they had a half an hour with SAP’s North American president Rob Enslin, what product or service would they ask for to make life easier?

Day & Zimmermann’s Anthony Bosco Jr. said he wanted more robust workforce planning capabilities. Raytheon’s Lesley Dickie said she needed a quicker turnaround on product development for her industry.

“I believe we still end up customizing and filling the gaps on our own,” she said.

Thomas Doyle of GT Solar, which manufactures materials used to make solar cells and panels, said he’d like more SaaS applications. It’s a way for his business to achieve a smaller application footprint, he said. He could envision launching applications such as human resources in this manner.

Doyle’s response was perhaps a signal that SAP’s approach to on-demand applications for the big guys may need to trickle down to the smaller ones too. GT Solar is an SAP Business All-in-One customer, SAP’s on-premise ERP for the midmarket.

A few months ago, SAP said it would develop on-demand applications for large enterprises that would integrate with and extend functionality in the on-premise SAP Business Suite.

And in the past few weeks, it’s been pushing SAP Business ByDesign - its SaaS ERP for the midmarket — highlighting an upgrade and some Web services integration that the 80 or so pilot customers are trying out.

But what’s SAP’s strategy for selling applications like HR, or line-of-business apps, to small and midsized companies?  It seems to be companies like GT Solar will fall in the middle, leaving even more targets for companies like Salesforce.com, Workday and SuccessFactors.

What do you think? And what product or service from SAP would make your life easier?

SAP responds to slow install of SAP BusinessObjects Service Pack 2

SAP said this morning it’s aware of a slow-install issue with SAP BusinessObjects Service Pack 2 for Windows, but decided to release it anyhow to make its benefits available.

The problem will be fixed in Service Pack 3, according to SAP. SAP didn’t specify when the third service pack will be available.

PC World reported this morning that SAP BusinessObjects users are having a tough time deploying the new service pack, according to an independent BusinessObjects message board.

Users complained that it was taking too long - upwards of 18 hours — to install, one saying they had to stop the process because the downtime was too long.

SAP, when asked for comment, said that the install for Windows is very time-sensitive, but not for Linux or Unix.

“We were aware of this issue…but decided to go ahead and release it to make the benefits of the latest Service Pack immediately available to Windows platform customers as well,” Franz Aman, vice president of platform product marketing for SAP BusinessObjects said in a written statement. “The issue is documented in the release notes.”

Technically the slow install is caused by a Windows install routine that does dependency checking, he said. To avoid this in the future, SAP has an alternative approach that it will deploy in the next service pack release, Service Pack 3. Customers have the option of installing Service Pack 2 now if they have a compelling reason to do so, or they can move to Service Pack 3 when that becomes available.

One of the posts on the message board said that the new pack came with some nice goodies, but the install time was too long.

“Nice new features, another good step forward for WebI especially,” the poster wrote. “However, shame about the release build. It would be very difficult for my clients to negotiate sufficient downtime with the business to justify the install. Let alone change management testing for a back-out strategy.”

I’m curious whether there are other SAP BusinessObjects components that have proven particularly troublesome to install. Is installation more difficult on a Windows platform than Unix or Linux? How have you been overcoming issues? Please share.

Outliers: Some SAP customers not focusing on quick projects, quick SAP ROI

SAP held a roundtable in Boston yesterday afternoon, which featured a good sampling of industries and a who’s who of some of SAP’s biggest, and soon to be biggest, customers - Raytheon, Day & Zimmermann, Boston University, and GT Solar.

With the exception of Boston University, which is about to embark on a massive SAP rollout, all of the panelists indicated that their IT budgets would remain flat over the year and for some, through 2010.

We’ve heard over and over again that to meet economic challenges, customers are choosing quick projects with near immediate ROI. And that’s the case at the majority of companies. But it was interesting to hear a different perspective yesterday from companies that aren’t focusing on immediate gratification at all.

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