Market Buys Oracle’s Bravado, Shorts SAP’s
Last week we took a self-congratulatory victory lap when Oracle’s earnings confirmed our thesis from earlier this year. As Eric Savitz pointed out, we weren’t the only ones. In the earnings press release, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said:
“SAP appears to be rethinking their strategy as they lose application market share to Oracle and confront the difficulties of moving their application software to a modern Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),” said Ellison in the release. “They’ve just announced that they are delaying the next version of SAP applications until 2010. That’s a full two years behind Oracle’s scheduled delivery of our SOA Fusion applications. And now [SAP CEO Henning] Kagermann is talking about an acquisition strategy to augment SAP’s slowing organic growth. These are major changes in direction for SAP.”
That would indeed be a change for SAP, which previously only imitated Oracle’s bad moves. However, SAP fired back with their own press release, saying:
Since January of 2003, SAP has consistently articulated and delivered on its vision for enterprise SOA following a course of organic growth combined with strategic acquisitions. SAP offers customers market-leading, enterprise SOA applications today while Oracle’s next-generation applications exist only in PowerPoint and won’t be delivered until 2008 or beyond.
Hmm… he said, she said. Who to believe? We’ll call in the ultimate judge, the market:
