AppWar

Talk about serendipity ... ya, i have been using this word more often ever since i figured out what it means ... over at linkedin, a friend had joined a group, and i came to know about this from my homepage, and went and joined the group. The day after joining, someone posted an interesting link about the SAP vs Oracle wars. Shows something of the role communities can play in the free flow of knowledge, whether within or outside the organization.

But no, i am not writing about this. This post is about this article about the Oracle vs. SAP smackdown ... the gorillas of the enterprise apps market. Of course, knowing that i worked for quite some time (major part of my career) at Oracle, you can guess who i am rooting for. But, having said that, this is ot about who i am rooting for, but rather, what is being written by analysts. And it seems to be good news for Oracle over SAP. They are positioned much better off with respect to their vision in the enterprise apps space. Interesting ... for a long time (read at least the last couple of years), people have been trying to figure out what Oracle was thinking, acquiring over some of the enterprise apps heavyweights. In fact, at one point, folks has lost track of how many products Oracle had taken over. And i am talking about Oracle guys here.

But, it looks like they had a picture in mind, about where they see the apps headed. And, a good reason to take over PeopleSoft, Siebel, and a whole host of others ... Now, i am not clued into the details of this vision, but from what i read, there seems to be a coherent strategy in place, and its been in place even when people were wondering what Oracle was thinking.

Having said this, what is more important, when it comes to Oracle, is execution. This has not necessarily been their strong point. A lot of customers still have memories of what was called the "red bell of death", when you would see a red bell, and your browser would shut down. Things were better with R 12, but Oracle needs to make sure they can get large parts of Fusion right first up. Along with, of course, the migration path, but that is something which they would have already thought of, and been able to manage.

What are worth reading are also the comments from some of the readers. More so because they are a mixed bag. In fact, one comment reminded me about something which, i believe, was said of IBM:

Nobody lost his job for buying IBM.

Seems like a similar thought process running in favour of SAP?