Larry Ellison’s statements in today’s Oracle earnings press release about SAP’s product and acquisition strategy are a complete misrepresentation, said Bill Wohl, vice president of product and solutions public relations at SAP.
Ellison accused SAP of delaying the next version of its suite until 2010 after having difficulties moving its applications software to an SOA. He also latched on to recent comments made by SAP CEO Henning Kagermann that the company was thinking about making more acquisitions, and he concluded that SAP is rethinking its strategy and making major changes in direction.
SAP was having none of it.
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, said Wohl.
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, he said. MySAP ERP 2005 gives customers and partners a world-class ERP platform with planned, regular functionality enhancements without the need for major upgrades through 2010, and has been shipping to customers since June of 2006.
SAP has not spoken publicly about the next generation of its core suite. Ellison’s comments could refer to the announcement made at the SAP TechEd event last week that SAP is stabilizing its next-generation ERP for the next five years. It plans to provide upgrades to mySAP ERP 2005 in the form of enhancement packages that users can chose to implement or not.
The critical point is that the enhancements will not touch the core mySAP ERP platform. SAP said it wants to keep the backbone stable while enabling innovation through the rest of the system.
The upgrades will include xApps, services, and functional upgrades, and will be themed, addressing areas such a travel management or procurement, coming out at a rate of one to two per quarter. At the end of five years they will be rolled up and provided to users as a single upgrade.
