Oracle, SAP Continue To Duke It Out

Oracle's program will offer SAP R/3 customers up to a 100% license credit if they move to its platform. Oracle Consulting is offering a free SAP Migration Insight program, which includes a workshop about the migration process and a financing plan.

For those that switch to Oracle from SAP, "no payment is required until January 2006 through the Oracle financing program," Oracle president Charles Phillips says. "We're also taking parts of Fusion middleware and certifying that for SAP, so you can start with the infrastructure first and use our portal with SAP applications." Based on SAP's upgrade cycle, Philips estimates "about 7,000 customers are immediately targets for this program."

While many enterprise-resource-planning vendors struggled in 2004, SAP increased overall revenue by 17% and license revenue by 20%, not including acquisitions, according to numbers released Wednesday by AMR Research. SAP's ERP market share increased to more than 40%. The research firm says Oracle nearly doubled the size of its application business through its PeopleSoft Inc. acquisition last year but it expects SAP to finish with more than twice the revenue and market share of the combined Oracle-PeopleSoft.

Oracle claims it has had 40 customers in the last year switch from SAP to Oracle, including Group Voyagers and Usina Nova America. SAP revealed that it has lured away luggage manufacturer Samsonite.

Samsonite switched vendors under SAP's Safe Passage program introduced earlier this year. The North American-centric program offers a 75% credit for PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards licenses for switching.

SAP launched a defector program after Oracle finalized the PeopleSoft acquisition in January, hoping to capitalize on user uncertainty for Oracle's product road map and support. The software vendor claims Samsonite has joined "a growing list of companies" using the program.

Last month, SAP also made a bid for the customers of Retek Inc., a company Oracle acquired in April, and said it would offer incentives, such as discounts on software and services, to any Retek customer choosing to make the switch.