Head To Head: Oracle And ERP

SAP has made its business APIs available for some time and the company also develops those for new products in the SCM and CRM space - although this somewhat runs counter to SAP's integration story.

However, that is good only for as long as each vendor keeps its side of the bargain. In the past, both SAP and Oracle have made partner technology available and then taken charge of product development themselves. This is part of the cut and thrust of software development comparison between Oracle apps and SAP ERP, and there is always the risk that today's partners will find themselves stranded in the future.

SAP, for example, announced it would be actively promoting Software AG's Adabas database in preference to Oracle in new licence deals, because it sees Oracle as an ERP competitor. The fact that Oracle databases run in excess of 75 per cent of SAP's accounts holds out the promise that Oracle database sales will act as a Trojan Horse for application sales. This ought not to be surprising since Oracle has just announced 35 products in the CRM space, an area where SAP is way behind the competition and already under threat from the likes of Vantive and Siebel.

In Comparison between Oracle apps and SAP ERP we are increasingly seeing not just functional extensions but a wave of partnerships. For example, Broadbase has partnered with both Clarify and Vantive to provide analytic applications. Broadbase integrates and analyses data from front- and back-office applications, e-commerce systems and external data sources. The idea is that companies achieve maximum value from one-to-one customer relationships and enterprise operations.

From a user perspective, this provides closed-loop intelligence in the entire customer interaction and when used appropriately, avoids the kind of situation that Patricia Seybold describes in her book Customers.com. A telephone mail order customer is told a product is out of stock, but is advised by the tele-sales operator the same product is available at K-Mart. The response is: "Why don't you go get it at K-Mart and mail it to me?" But putting this type of application into the ERP/CRM/SCM mix adds a layer of complexity.

Much of today's integration work is tied to transaction processing systems but analytic applications draw on subsets of data, usually contained in a staged area or through a data warehouse. If one accepts that the long-term goal for the enterprise is to link its major applications together, to provide a single view of customer interaction and distribute that information across a wide range of potential users, then significant problems lay ahead.

On the one hand, transaction systems have now reached the point where scaling is taken as a given. But data warehouses are typically used by small numbers of users, and extending the information generated in the warehouse back out to applications that sit alongside ERP is not a trivial task.

ERP SAP