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Customers defecting to Oracle? Not according to our research, says SAP chief number cruncher

Must be Larry trash talking again

SAP's chief bean counter Luka Mucic has belatedly rubbished claims by arch rival Oracle that it is poaching some of the German software maker's largest customers.

Asked about investors’ concerns over Oracle’s claims during a call with financial analysts, Mucic said SAP had researched its client base beyond the top-10 or top-50 customers to understand “what our competitors are talking about there”.

“We are not aware of any competitive replacement. We, actually, are aware of quite a few [deals where] we have competitively replaced other ERP solutions from our traditional competition through S/4HANA,” he said.

The research undertaken by SAP covered all geographies and industries, he said. “I can only say, we, from our own data and from our own intelligence believe that we continue to gain market share in our strong holds in ERP and supply chain management."

The firm rebuttal is in response to claims made by Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison in March. In his characteristic bombastic style, Ellison told Oracle investors that Big Red was working with 10 of SAP's largest customers and would make public any deals with those businesses migrating to Oracle Fusion applications in the summer.

Since the spring, though, Ellison has been rather less vocal on the subject. In Oracle's Q4 earnings call, he seemed to have completely forgotten about the supposed exodus of SAP customers.

The SAP CFO also took the opportunity to clarify remarks made by his boss, CEO Christian Klein, during the company virtual conference in June. He said integration between its applications stood at 50 per cent, and would be at 90 per cent by the end of the year.

This week, Mucic clarified that commitment only applied to the four core end-to-end business processes of HR, ERP, supply chain and spend management and CRM. This could leave out products in expense management (Concur) and customer sentiment (Qualtrics).

“We want to make sure that our respective applications that are covering those end-to-end business processes by the end of the year are able to achieve a couple of very important deep level integration qualities. This is not only high-level technical API-based integration, which we have had for many years, we are talking about a common user experience, a common analytics layer, common reporting structures and a common data model,” he said.

The idea was to reduce barriers to adoption and the complexity of implementations across application pillars, he said. ®

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