Oracle Corp yesterday dismissed SAP AG’s decision to shift its development environment to IBM’s DB2 database as self serving and designed solely to hurt Oracle, not to give SAP customers more choice as the ERP vendor claims.
Speaking to ComputerWire, Jeremy Burton, Oracle’s VP of server marketing said that SAP’s customers, 75% of whom run their R/3 implementations on Oracle’s databases, would not have arrived at the same conclusion had they been given the choice. If they [SAP] went and asked their customer base then I don’t think they would have come up with the same decision to switch to IBM, he said. It may mean that the customers do not get the updates to R/3 as quickly as they would have done before because SAP will choose to roll them out on DB2 first.
Burton’s comments come a day after SAP announced it would throw out Oracle as its primary development environment for R/3 and instead switch to IBM’s DB2 database. While many in the industry see the move as a clear dig at Oracle, which competes with SAP in both the ERP and front office application space, SAP denied that to be the case, saying it made the shift because IBM offered its customers greater platform support. SAP says DB2 can run on Solaris, Linux, NT, AIX, OS/390 and AS/400 whereas Oracle’s flagship 8i cannot run on either OS/390 or AS/400, it says.
Burton admitted Oracle didn’t support what he called the prehistoric AS/400 server but said its database did run on the OS/390 as well as all the other platforms DB2 runs on. This is more marketing than reality, Burton said, SAP would like for Oracle to be in none of their accounts. This was clearly an attempt to try and move their customers away from Oracle.
Whatever the arguments, it seems strange that there’s been no talk of contracts. Presumably if Oracle was SAP’s primary development platform, there would have been a joint agreement between the two. Yet no such contract has been mentioned. Burton hinted that there had been discussions between the two vendors leading up to yesterday’s announcement but said that he was unable to comment because Oracle was currently in its quiet period. Despite several attempts, a spokesperson for SAP was not available for comment.
