ERP Software

The Last Good Man from Oracle

From 2001 to 2007 I enjoyed good working relationships with a number of Oracle leaders from Fred Studer to John Wookey to ex-META Group mates like Kip Martin and Steve Bonadio. I even had a fairly warm relationship with Peggy O’Neill, the most feared head of analyst relations in the IT industry. Oracle was always a wine culture and you could get along just fine there as long as you stayed away from the top-most echelon.

But it’s all over now. One by one, Oracle has shed its brightest talents and personalities. Now it’s purely Larry Ellison, the Bill O’Reilly of the IT industry, as the voice of Oracle.

I did not know Charles Phillips all that well but found him to be straightforward, with a sense of humor and more transparency than most executives as his level. Living in an analyst world, I hear and read volumes of carping about the various vendor executives but I never heard a negative word about Charles. On the contrary, he enjoyed near unanimous admiration amongst the analysts and once the rare occasions when he lent his voice to the SAP-Oracle dust-ups, he did so with understatement and dignity. When he left Oracle in September, I closed the book on that company. When he joined Infor, I reopened their book, having to date viewed Infor as a software mini-mall in bad need of market rationalization.

Over recent months there has been a definite and creepy tabloid feel to various hirings and firings. Apotheker Out at SAP amid Disappointing Results. Mark Hurd Accused of Sexual Harassment and Expense Cheats, Drummed out of HP. Apotheker in at HP. Hurd Named President at Oracle. And of course Larry Ellison’s classy quote: “That's the new HP Way with Ray [Lane] in charge and Leo [Apotheker] on the run. It's time to change the HP tagline from 'Invent' to 'Steal'."

The Infor pick-up of Charles Phillips is, for me, a feel-good story. Until the estimable Bruce Richardson joined Infor as head of strategy, the place seemed doomed to be an Apps R Us way station. The combination of Charles and Bruce is a game changer that dispels my gloom over the HP-Oracle-Apotheker hubbub and gives me hope that something in the way of new and clear vision may well hit the world of enterprise applications within the next year or so. Let’s face it: we have seen little true vision or innovation out of anyone (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Infor, et al) over the past seven years.

With Hurd and Sun now fully in the Oracle camp, I think we can clearly see that Oracle is a techno-giant and that enterprise applications are a third class citizen within that eco-system. Such news should hardly be comforting to Oracle 11i clients or those still wondering what the hell Fusion is all about (six years on). As for HP, taking on a man whose analyst world nickname is The Grump does not seem promising the wake of a Carly’s-gone-but-Hurd-will-save-us-oops phase of operations.

All of these moves provide SAP with a clear chance to distance itself once and forever from Oracle. The fact is that SAP and Oracle do not face off in the market near as much as one might think (how many Fortune 500 firms use more than a sliver of Oracle?) and the “SAP vs. Oracle” meme is tired, tiring, and false. So while Oracle gets correctly lumped in with HP and its Sun acquisition, now is the time for SAP to re-brand itself as a “business solutions” firm and not just an enterprise applications software firm. And here’s a vision: in the next three years, we are talking about “SAP vs. Infor” while Larry continues down the dusty techno trail.