SAP says Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s statements—which he made in announcing his company’s better-than-expected earnings on Tuesday—about its products and strategy are “a complete misrepresentation.”
In a statement SAP released Tuesday night, Bill Wohl, SAP’s vice president of product and solutions public relations, said: “Larry Ellison’s statements in [Tuesday’s] Oracle earnings press release about SAP’s product and acquisition strategy are a complete misrepresentation.”
In Oracle’s earnings press release, for the period ended Aug. 31, Ellison questioned SAP’s commitment to its service-oriented architecture. He also singled out SAP CEO Henning Kagermann’s recent remarks about embarking on an acquisition strategy.
“SAP appears to be rethinking their strategy as they lose application market share to Oracle and confront the difficulties of moving their application software to a modern service oriented architecture (SOA),” Ellison was quoted as saying. “They’ve just announced that they are delaying the next version of SAP applications until 2010. That’s a full two years behind Oracle’s scheduled delivery of our SOA Fusion applications. And now Kagermann is talking about an acquisition strategy to augment SAP’s slowing organic growth. These are major changes in direction for SAP.”
In SAP’s rebuttal, Wohl said: “Since January of 2003, SAP has consistently articulated and delivered on its vision for enterprise SOA following a course of organic growth combined with strategic acquisitions.”
SAP did not address Ellison’s assertion that Oracle is capturing market share.
Wohl characterized Oracle’s Fusion project—which promises to merge applications from Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and J.D. Edwards—as existing “only in PowerPoint and won’t be delivered until 2008 or beyond.”
SAP pointed out that in January, Oracle claimed it was halfway to Fusion. Two weeks ago, however, Oracle said the project was not quite halfway done. “Oracle needs to adopt one version of the truth, and be honest with the market on its actual progress,” Wohl said in SAP’s statement.
