Oracle’s Booming Cloud Business Could Rip And Replace SAP As #1 In Apps

An interesting article published on Forbes. I bring you some extracts:

 

For decades, SAP has been the world leader in enterprise applications and Oracle has been the frontrunner in enterprise databases, with both companies retaining their leadership positions in spite of the seismic shifts in the industry caused by the moves from mainframes to minicomputers to client-server to the Internet.

 

Oracle’s recent surge in cloud-applications revenue—it sold $1 billion in SaaS apps during the quarter ended May 31 and $3.4 billion for the year—give it a legitimate chance to overtake SAP as the world’s #1 provider of enterprise applications, particularly in the massive cloud ERP market.

 

But growth is not over:

Triggering that steep growth, said Hurd, were 868 new Cloud ERP customers in Q4, plus 200 more “expansions” from customers that were added more of the Oracle Cloud ERP services to ones they’d purchased previously.

Oracle also focuses on the completeness of its solutions:

 

Indeed, it was the ERP business that powered SAP to prominence in the enterprise-applications space over the past 30 years as it dominated the global market for software that helps companies manage finances, run supply chains, oversee purchasing and more.

And while Oracle has been offering a full set of Cloud ERP services for only a handful of quarters, SAP didn’t introduce the SaaS version of its flagship ERP franchise until early this year—giving Oracle a few quarters to build up considerable momentum.

Outlook predicts Oracle’s leader in SAP in ERP cloud solutions:

 

So as long-time competitors Oracle and SAP square off in this new and strategically vital category, the evidence I’ve been able to gather so far tells me that Oracle is the clear leader over SAP so far in the cloud ERP space. And here are a few things we know and don’t know:

• We know SAP fully understands how essential it is for the company to win in the cloud ERP space. And we don’t know just how well that 6-month effort is going.
• We know SAP has thousands of longtime on-premise ERP customers across the globe, and we know that Oracle’s cloud ERP team will be doing everything in its power to woo those companies away from SAP when those businesses move their ERP systems to the cloud.
• We know Oracle posted about $300 million in cloud ERP revenue in its most-recent quarter, growing more than 150% and creating the $1.2 billion annualized run rate cited by Hurd. We don’t know what type of revenue S/4HANA Cloud is currently generating.
• We do know SAP’s Roos is extremely bullish on his cloud ERP prospects: “We provide a high level of flexibility and extensibility via the SAP Cloud Platform and none of our competitors are offering the same level of integration between cloud apps,” Roos said in his email reply to my questions. “In May, we released significant enhancements for large enterprises including discrete manufacturers, and we’ll continue our rapid quarterly innovation cycles with our August release, which will, among other things, bring Treasury & Risk Management, Contract and Lease Management.”
• We know that business customers will be huge winners in this latest Oracle-SAP shootout because both of these exceptional tech companies know that unless they deliver superlative products at attractive prices, the other will prevail.
• In his concluding email remark, Roos said, ” We see Oracle and we compete with them.  And as more of our customers go live and put our Cloud ERP at their core, I’m confident this will be a true runaway story for SAP.”

 

 

Read the complete article for all the details!

 

Source: Forbes