SAP AG’s VP of worldwide marketing, Gunther Tolkmit, yesterday denied that the software company’s decision to sell its own database, based on Software AG’s Adabas D technology, was a way preventing rival applications vendor Oracle Corp from stealing SAP customers through database sales. Instead, he insisted the move was a way of offering users more choice. It’s important in this space that customers have a lot of choice, he told ComputerWire. If they vote with their feet and go for the SAP database, then that’s obviously fine with us, but there’s no notion that ours is the best, he said. Up until now, the German enterprise resource planning company has only resold databases – from Software AG, IBM, Informix, Microsoft and Oracle – to its existing customers as a platform for its applications software.
But under an agreement announced earlier this week, it said it planned to start selling its own database, a version of Software AG’s Adabas D product, to both existing and new customers, effectively pitting itself as a database competitor against the likes of Oracle and Informix. Most industry watchers agree that the move is designed to stop Oracle, who supplies three-quarters of SAP installations with an underlying database, from moving in on existing and potential SAP customers and offering them its Oracle ERP and front office applications as well. Currently, only 700 customers use the Adabas system. Although Tolkmit denies this is the case, on the face of it, there seems to be little other motivation for this week’s agreement with Software AG.
The two German companies have long been partners and since R/3’s inception, Tolkmit said the Adabas database has always been available as a platform for its applications. Up until 1997, Software AG sold the database to SAP customers directly but in 1997, the company suddenly withdrew its support for the platform and no longer sells or supports the product in the SAP market. Tolkmit wouldn’t say why the two parted company, and Software AG didn’t return calls by the time we went to press, but the result was that SAP acquired full rights to the Adabas D technology. Under the agreement, SAP was entitled to offer service to existing Adabas users and to resell an SAP-developed version of the database, optimized for new releases of R/3, to those same customers who wanted to expand their existing Adabas deployment, Tolkmit said. It could not, however, resell the database to new customers. He added that SAP has since used technology from the Adabas component-based development environment for the development of other products, including its supply chain and knowledge management software.
Tolkmit says the reason that SAP decided to change its agreement with Software AG was because its customers were coming to SAP and asking it for a competitive database. So we decided to open this kind of channel, he said. SAP won’t bundle the database with R/3, nor will it push the software as the preferred platform for its applications, Tolkmit added. But with Oracle fast gaining ground in the applications space – sales of its manufacturing application have now surpassed SAP’s in the US – the ERP vendor may well rethink its strategy.
