Oracle Vs SAP : Here’s What You Must Know

Oracle Vs SAP! with which one we should go? Here are some basic point to be noted before approaching to any of it.SAP has a 24% share of the market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Oracle, SAP’s leading competitor, is still a contender with 18% of this market.

Originally a database company, Oracle has acquired significant middleware software, talent, and experience in recent years by acquiring Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA, JD Edwards and others. It has very strong database and software offerings, and PeopleSoft and Siebel have excellent HR and CRM offerings respectively.

Assessing “Oracle vs SAP” is becoming an increasingly popular, as the two companies have recently positioned themselves as competitors. Most recently SAP announced that it would start running its flagship ERP software on HANA, SAP’s in-memory database platform.

Until now, a majority of SAP’s customers actually ran SAP on an Oracle database, although seems to be changing given SAP’s acquisition of Sybase.

 

Oracle vs SAP

So, Why Exactly Are Businesses Buying SAP?

The important point to remember when comparing “Oracle vs SAP” is that SAP has been a pioneer in the ERP business for a long time, and its deep understanding of business processes is part of what its customers are buying. It offers a framework- a road map put together by experts using their knowledge to help customers handle known issues and avoid foreseeable challenges.

Oracle on the other hand is new to the ERP software business and it talks about its software as a stack, in contrast to the single customizable Business Suite offered by SAP.

Both companies are also moving into the arena of big data software as a service (SaaS). Oracle’s Exa- products and SAP’s HANA represent the two companies’ attempts to reposition themselves for this market. But it once again boils down to an Oracle vs SAP slugfest in the area of human capital management and customer relations management software. The dueling products in this area are SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle’s Fusion HCM.

 

How Licensing Costs Compare

• The licensing costs of Oracle and SAP are similar. However, Oracle charges its customers an additional hidden fee equal to 22% of the license cost for the first year of maintenance. This fee is mandatory – the maintenance cannot be unbundled from the server, and so this cost must be factored in when considering any Oracle solution.

• A study found that SAP implementations typically took longer and cost more than Oracle projects, possibly because SAP projects tend to be bigger and more complex. On the other hand, SAP installs had average cost overruns less than half the size of Oracle’s.

Those projects that took longer than expected were usually not delayed by factors under the vendor’s control, however. The most frequent reason given in a recent survey was that the project scope had been expanded. Many of the others, like resource constraints and problems with the data, are generally the purview of the customer.

 

Oracle vs SAP Bottom Line

SAP scalability can handle enterprise scenarios of essentially any size. Concerns about SAP’s cost can be mitigated with careful definition of project scope to avoid creep, particularly in customization and staff training. When you need the best and most robust solution, SAP is the way to go.