January 19, 2005

A few months back, when Microsoft made a special offer for PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards' legacy applications, effectively inviting prospective clients to choose Microsoft over Oracle, an industry analyst called it "fishing". Today, a much more serious attempt to lure those customers is actually being made by SAP, the world's largest enterprise applications provider.

SAP's offer is more than a pitch for its own applications, as the company has acquired TomorrowNow.

TomorrowNow, a third-party support specialist for PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications.

What SAP's doing here is similar, in concept at least, to Oracle's own strategy. Oracle promised support for PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications until 2013, but yesterday Oracle CEO Larry Ellison emphasized that the real goal is for those customers to migrate to "Project Fusion," the next-generation Oracle product that will fold up legacy Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards applications into a standards-based suite.

SAP, too, can promise support and a migration vision.

Ellison anticipated something of the kind in his speech yesterday, when he noted that SAP would have to respond to Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. Competitively speaking, he noted that one big differentiator was Java, on which Oracle has bet future development; meanwhile, Ellison associated SAP with a proprietary strategy that, in the long term, he believes developers and customers will eschew.

SAP didn't choose to get into that debate today, but its release did note that the SAP NetWeaver platform and other standards-based components do allow for SAP to play well with other applications.

Further, a research alert from AMR made the point that, in the long term, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are heading in the same architectural direction.

"The 2007-2008 time frame for Project Fusion tracks with SAP's plans for an Enterprise Services Architecture and Microsoft's goals for Project Green, its next-generation Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) architecture." That, said the alert, underlines the fact that "Oracle and SAP are on a collision course."

Article by: Demir Barlas,
Source: Line 56