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SAP vs. Oracle, Battle Royale
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."
if ORACLE's TCO is 48% lower than SAP, just how many small countries' budgets does SAP charge for a small installation?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
2. A small, blunt object used as a weapon, often constructed from a bag filled with loose, heavy objects such as lead shot or coins.
5. Colloquially, a sap is a weak or gullible person. Also known as dupe; see confidence trick.
Why isn't Net present value used as the benchmark for comparing two IT projects? It really is the only one that makes sense because TCO doesn't take into account the interest rate.
Seriously, how many people have ever had a chance to glimpse into the dark heart of SAP? It's very ugly. Hedious even.
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
in the process of buying the pieces to start their own ERP suite
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.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
it's a carefully placed advertisement from the Oracle PR machine. 48%? Gimme a break, no one can determine TOC figures for something as complicated as SAP to that degree of precision.
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.
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Don't be fooled, slashdot has many lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as third party opinion. FUD too.
Until now I was sure that the only thing with a higher TCO than Oracle was a Sea Stallion helicopter (38 hours of maintenance required for every hour of flight). I guess I never thought about SAP TCO because most of the SAP rollouts I heard about failed.
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.
lucm, indeed.
The reason you have not seen an open source SAP is because it's so big and monsterous and hard to figure out what it does, that no-one knows if there's already an open source SAP or not. There could be several right now.
Only half kidding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ever noticed how all the biggest, most successful OSS projects are basic computing infrastructure projects? They're software written by techies, for techies. Things like compilers, operating systems, networking infrastructure, web server platforms, languages, databases. To write these things all you need to know is protocols, fundamental software architectures and how to program. They are areas where competent techie developers have a large amount of 'domain knowledge' - experience and in-depth understanding of the problem at hand.
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
If all of the people that had no experience in implementing or supporting SAP or Oracle ERP systems refrained from responding to this article, it would be very quiet in here.
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.