techslog

Oracle and SAP's notorious rivalry occupied center stage this week. Larry Ellison stabbed at SAP, predicting Oracle's middleware is years ahead of SAP's Netweaver. Not to be outdone, an SAP VP clobbered back, claiming Oracle's next-generation applications exist only in PowerPoint.

But proof of success is in the numbers, and recent announcements put both companies out in front of each other, depending on whose numbers you're following. Oracle's recent $20 billion spend in acquisitions delivered the hoped-for market share steal from SAP, causing Oracle's quarterly profit to rise 29 percent and revenue 30 percent (read all earnings news.)

However, Forbes ranked SAP in the top spot among software companies (and number 381 out of 2,000 overall) in Forbes Global High Performers list of big companies that are great at what they do. Oracle didn't make the list of the top 2,000 companies; but Infosys, Adobe, Yahoo, Autodesk and Verisign were there with SAP.

SAP came out on top, compared to Oracle, in another ranking. According to a recent study of the SCM software market by AMR Research, SAP is the top vendor with 12 percent the SCM software market. The study ranks Oracle in second place with 10 percent of market share.

Despite Ellison's opinion of SAP's Netweaver, Indian outsourcer Satyam is setting up an SAP training academy for 1,500 of its staff on Netweaver and other SAP technologies in order to meet Satyam's customers' demand for SAP services.

SAP undoubtedly also hit a home run with customers with its announcement a few days ago that it is simplifying the upgrade process for its customers, making mySAP ERP 2005 its core platform until 2010 with small components every few months that will be easy for customers to install on their own.

Open source is also in winning form. In fact, a blogger says the only thing standing in the way of seven-figure success for open source is not understanding the business models that drive it. An analyst with the Robert Frances Group says it's no longer a question of open source versus proprietary software and that it's now about about mainstreaming. Indeed, a survey in summer 2006 revealed that 24 percent of the Internet is now manged by open-source Web content management systems (more open source news, opinion .)

Open-source technologies are also becoming magnets for acquisitions. Venture capital firms like open source too. Nevertheless, open source may have a problem with the controversy surrounding the issue of patents on software processes.

Despite its success thus far, service-oriented-architecture may also have a budding problem with the way corporations are budgeting their SOA initiatives. HP has three new facilities to pilot and evaluate SOA implementations. And Soasta, a developer of tools for testing and certification of SOA-based systems has a new CEO (more software Executive Moves. )

The vendor landscape continues to change. EMC is buying Network Intelligence Corp; Art Technology Group acquired eStara, Motorola bought Symbol Technologies; and Cisco acquired Arroyo Video Solutions. Despite the sure success of Indian vendors, research firm Evalueserve questions whether the glut of VC money for early-stage investments in India can actually be absorbed by start-ups and early-stage companies.

Speaking of M&A, don't miss SandHill.com's new Finance section. The Sand Hill 30 index debuts, charting the progress of the software and services stocks which are driving the next generation of enterprise software. The new software M&A page summarizes the latest trends, the week in deals and all the latest headlines. The software venture capital section offers coverage of all the most recent news and deals.

Noted & quoted: The market for replication software grew by 13.2 percent since last year and storage management software by 32 percent; a new record was set for at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the most software patents in a single year (2006), and the year isn't over yet; Sourceforge published a list of the top 10 most popular free open source enterprise applications; opinion is out that software vendors are not doing a good job of discussing the value of their software with existing customers; Microsoft filed 20 lawsuits against sellers of counterfeit and fake softwarenot matched expectations this year; Adobe has added Web conferencing services to its PDF software; and corporations are bowing to consumerism and adopting social networking technologies.

"Security is getting worse. To improve the security of software, Microsoft Corp. and others should be made liable for selling software that is not secure."
--Bruce Schneier, CTO, Counterpane Internet Security

http://www.sandhill.com/news/news_summary.php?id=27