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Oracle launches full frontal assault against SAP
Oracle isn't taking any more crap from its German rival and market leader SAP. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Oracle president Charles Philips upped the stakes of the recent Peoplesoft acquisition, declaring the takeover is success only if Oracle surpasses SAP.
"We're ready to take on SAP head to head," Phillips told the business newspaper (paid subscription). "We want to pass them eventually" in terms of market share. Within three or four years "we should be seeing the whites of their eyes."
SAP should have expected Oracle to return fire after the German enterprise software made some real efforts at stealing away Peoplesoft customers.
The target of overtaking SAP however seems to point for a new justification of the Peoplesoft acquisition.
Sources familiar with the matter have previously name Microsoft as the prime reason for Oracle to seek more economies of scale. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year even testified to that extent before a federal judge in San Francisco. The acquisition was about consolidation and expansion into new markets serving midsized businesses, not about battling over marketshare with SAP.
I can only speculate about the reasoning behind Ellison's course change. It seems like Microsoft isn't considered that much of a threat anymore now that the company appears to be tied up in getting Longhorn, the upcoming version of Windows, to market in a timely fashion. Meanwhile Microsoft's existing enterprise application suites seem to struggle in getting traction.
February 1, 2005 at 06:39 PM | Permalink
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