Sunday, April 13, 2008

SAP Vs Oracle- NetWeaver (SAP) Vs. Fusion (Oracle)

SAP Vs Oracle- NetWeaver (SAP) Vs. Fusion (Oracle) 1st of all there are various grounds on which we can compare an ERP package, But we can never say that any particular ERP (SAP Vs Oracle) is better than other. Oracle went on a shopping spree, gobbling up companies like J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Retek and others. Suddenly, there are two gorillas in the market, along with a whole bunch of customers who now find themselves under the Oracle umbrella. I believe SAP has done a better job of both articulating its roadmap for NetWeaver and delivering on it. To be fair, that is in part because they have been at it longer than Oracle. Fusion is barely a year old, whereas NetWeaver has been bandied about as a concept for almost three years. But I also believe that SAP's advantage in building out its own applications – as opposed Oracle's strategy of acquiring or partnering to build its applications portfolio – has allowed the market to see more clearly where SAP is going and what functionality will be available once the full force of NetWeaver's service architecture can be brought to bear on the market. Oracle's Fusion Middleware strategy is relatively well thought-out and well-defined, but the roadmap for Fusion Applications still has a lot of blank space in it – placeholders for as-yet unannounced acquisitions and partnerships. Oracle's workflow and business event system allows companies to configure business processes in a variety of ways, with the capability of sending e-mail notifications and alerts to practically anyone associated with the organization. SAP does not offer anything that is equally configurable or flexible. This means that, in addition to a strong services infrastructure, a vendor needs a large portfolio of services to assemble – the more the merrier. This is where SAP's next advantage comes into play. SAP's has experience in 28 verticals, and the software functionality to prove it. As NetWeaver unfolds, one of SAP's tasks will be to service-orient all that functionality and make it available as building blocks for the future. That's a non-trivial task, but one that, once done, provides SAP customers with an exceptionally large palette of vertical industry functionality on which to build their service-oriented future. Oracle, on the other hand, has always lagged in providing deep vertical functionality, a fact acknowledged by the vertical focus of their acquisition and partnering strategy. While there is some deep vertical functionality now in the Fusion playbook – Retek in retail was a major coup, and Siebel can provide some CRM-specific vertical functionality in the industries that it targeted – the scope of this functionality still lags behind that of SAP. And while Oracle is now vowing to fill in the blanks with more partner products, until we can evaluate exactly what those products can do and how many vertical industries they allow Oracle to compete in, SAP still has the vertical industry advantage. SAP requires on average four times more internal resources, and companies spend almost twice as much for SAP training Further, the SAP customisations and integration issues can increase consulting costs substantially. A company can install Oracle Applications and begin conducting its operations successfully in six months. If an organization is looking to sustain its competitive advantage and become a market leader in its industry, this means constant organizational change through streamlining business processes, reorganization and restructuring, and so forth. As economic history confirms, these activities are demanding in and of themselves. They become nearly impossible with an ERP system that is inflexible, difficult to implement and maintain, hard to use and unnecessarily costly. Oracle Applications, on the other hand, can be successfully deployed in a short time frame. It is flexible and highly configurable. It has a lower TCO than SAP. Working with Oracle Applications is easier than SAP, according to users who have seen both. Does Oracle really have a better offering than SAP? The answer is a resounding "Yes!"