SAP and Oracle in the Ring

Who needs a weekend on the couch watching cars go around in circles on ESPN when we can read about the ongoing battle of the false gods?!  SAP and Oracle have been duking it out, and even taking each other to court over what can best be described as "predatory support."  Now, via the AccMan blog, comes a study from Nucleus Research comparing the customer experience with each bloated hunk 'o software.  It tilts ever so slightly in Oracle's favor, so guess who's promoting the heck out the results!  Let's take a look at some tidbits.

As a group, all Oracle customers were in line to achieve a positive ROI. The story was somewhat different for the SAP customers: in some cases, customers expected they would have to spend more to achieve ROI:

• "We are yet to see it… we'll probably get ROI but with more work, and we'll have to get some modules and do some more customization."
• "I'm not so sure about ROI. SAP is very expensive for what we are getting. I'd need more people to use the system but I can't justify the licenses because of the cost.

Unfortunately, for many SAP customers the scale of ongoing costs was simply greater than the scale of benefits being achieved: 34 percent of SAP customers are unlikely to ever achieve a positive ROI without changes in their deployment, given that annual ongoing costs are greater than the value of benefits received.

Ouch.  But note the general "in line to achieve" instead of hard stats for the Oracle side of that particular analysis.  But let's go on.

69 percent of the SAP deployments were on time, while 78 percent of the Oracle deployments were on time.

45 percent of the SAP deployments were on budget, while 63 percent of the Oracle deployments were on budget. When looking at the SAP customers, Nucleus found that not a single customer went under budget, and of the 55 percent that went over budget, overruns ranged from a low of 20 percent to a high of nearly 100 percent.

44 percent of Oracle customers felt strongly enough about their success that they were actively recommending Oracle, while only 10 percent of the SAP customers felt the same.

Well you get the picture.  Oracle was marginally better on the metrics analyzed, which are by no means all the metrics associated with these gargantuan projects.  Would you really feel comfortable going into a multimillion dollar software deployment knowing that even if you chose the "best" vendor you had a 37% chance of a major cost overrun?  Or that after some unknown time period you might be "in line to achieve a positive ROI?"

Not to mention how business process changes will have to be modified to conform to how the cubicle geeks at SAP or Oracle believe you should run your business.  I wonder how many of them have set foot in a real factory, let alone a factoy leveraging lean manufacturing.  Or the impact on your healthcare costs and absenteeism when your folks lock up all available local psychiatrists during the implementation process.

I think I still prefer the Staples option.