Oracle Corp’s increasing dominance of the SAP applications market coupled with a lack of support from SAP AG to help it compete, forced Software AG to cut off support for the R/3 platform, a spokesperson for the company told ComputerWire yesterday. Reudiger Hanson, director of IT press for Software AG (SAG), said that SAP was making so many changes to its R/3 system that SAG wasn’t able to develop compatible releases of its Adabas database in time enough to keep up. We analyzed the business and looked into SAP and non-SAP markets, he said, and we realized the requirements of SAP were so huge, and were changing every time they set up a new version, that it was too much effort for us to modify the database.

Hanson said SAG had acquired the Adabas D database from Nixdorf (now merged with Siemens) in 1990, as a way of competing against Oracle in the SQL database server market. The company already had an existing, and widely adopted, product, called Adabas, for the mainframe and Unix market. But by 1997, Oracle’s dominance in the R/3 server market was growing so fast that SAG realized it was fighting a losing battle. Over three-quarters of all R/3 users (around 20,000) run their applications on an Oracle database, while a mere 700 use Adabas D. We didn’t have a lot of support from SAP and we couldn’t keep releasing new versions of the database to coincide with R/3, so in the end we decided it made no sense for us to continue this business. Hanson said the two companies met on October 1, 1997 whereupon SAG announced its withdrawal from the SAP market and handed over all its existing customers to SAP.

But rather than acquire full rights to the Adabas D database technology, as SAP has implied, it turns out SAP was only given rights to the version of the database available at the time, release 6.1. As previously reported in ComputerWire, SAP was entitled to develop that database, to optimize it for future releases of R/3, and to sell the software to existing Adabas customers. It was not allowed to resell the database to new customers. For its part, Hanson said SAG started with the same version of Adabas and developed a new version, Adabas 10, which was no longer compatible with R/3 systems. The version, release 11, likewise does not support SAP. Nor does it support software from any of the other major ERP vendors such as Baan or Peoplesoft, Hanson said. Instead, the company prefers to work with small vendors in the German market where it derives most of its business, though it does distribute worldwide, he added.

Both the SAP and SAG databases use the same engine, but SAP has since carried out so many modifications and added so many new interfaces that its product looks very different from the one SAG markets and sells today, Hanson said. As a result, the ERP vendor can’t market its database under the Adabas D brand name and will, at some stage in the near future, have to rename the software before it starts selling to new customers. SAP was typically tight-lipped about when that might be, but a source close to the company said it would be making an announcement some time very soon. Both the 1997 deal and last week’s extension involved one- time royalty payments, said Hanson, although he declined to give their value.