SAP Takes Swing At Oracle; HP Exec Heckles Dell's TV Initiative

SAP America President and CEO Bill McDermott said Oracle's attempt to swallow PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards is bad for customers. "If you're living in a world where SAP has 60 percent market share, and the next [competitors] are in the low teens, you've got these guys fighting each other, and the big problem is, 'what does that do for you?' The answer is 'nothing,' " McDermott told thousands during his keynote Tuesday morning. "How do you integrate different platforms? Everyone is fighting it out on the lower end of the market for market share. We're focused on customers."

He said Oracle's strategy won't work because the "run-up of technology acquisitions from best-of-breed suppliers" in recent years has led to massive application-integration problems for customers who now want to consolidate their application base and vendors.

"Best-of-breed companies in Silicon Valley are delivering brochures and not delivering to customers," McDermott said, predicting that Oracle won't be able to sew together disparate applications and cultures of three vendors. "Partner ecosystems are needed [to deliver full solutions], but customers want a single point of accountability--one throat to choke. The merger, acquisition and consolidation environment is absolutely defining the marketplace we operate in today," he said. "We know Citrix, HP and SAP will be around for a long time. I'm not sure about the other guys."

Meanwhile, one executive from HP--a key Citrix partner--took the opportunity at iForum to take a swipe at nemesis Dell.

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Jim Milton, senior vice president and managing director of HP's Enterprise Systems Group, North Americas, said the HP-Compaq marriage was the "best-executed corporate merger" in the world, and that the combined entity is in better position to serve the corporate audience than Dell.

"Dell got rid of the word 'Computer' from its name because they're in the TV business," Milton quipped, referring to Dell's recently announced plans to enter the consumer-electronics business.

The HP executive also told the audience here that 60 percent of Citrix deployments run on HP platforms and that the two companies have many reseller partners in common.

While HP, SAP and Citrix united on stage this week, the gathering did not signify the creation of an alliance or triumvirate against other vendors, Citrix's top exec said.

"There's no alliance. Vendor bashing is about competition," said Mark Templeton, president and CEO of Citrix, acknowledging that his company is vendor-agnostic and that its fortunes have risen because of disparate systems. "It's an endless battle between all the giants."