SAP Exec Trash-Talks Oracle: 'I Have Not Seen Them'
BARCELONA -- Mobile World Congress 2017 -- Oracle has been trash-talking SAP for years, and now SAP is giving back.
The two companies are both old-line business application providers making the move into the cloud. At a press conference here Monday, SAP outlined its philosophy for enterprise cloud services, saying enterprise cloud apps can be divided into two models. One consists of existing applications that move from on-premises to the cloud. A second, newer model involves digitizing an enterprise's intellectual property, with information consumed in microservices and APIs, using machine learning and connectivity to both the Internet of Things and to people, said Bernd Leukert, a member of the executive board, SAP AG (NYSE/Frankfurt: SAP), products and innovation, at Monday's press conference. The latter model enables new business models and innovation, he added.
"Oracle is in model 1," Leukert said. "They have completely missed the Model 2 opportunity. In Model 1 they are a heavy competitor, but in Model 2, I have not seen them. There are startups that compete with us, but I have not seen that comprehensive picture from Oracle."
Leukert's "diss" mirrors comments made by Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) about SAP. For example, in an October, 2015 keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, company chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said Salesforce.com Inc. and Workday are competitors, but not SAP or IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). "The largest application company in the world, but we never see them in the cloud," Ellison said. (See Oracle's Ellison Trashes IBM & SAP, Struts Cloud Stuff.)
We're expecting to see Leukert and Ellison get into a Jell-O wrestling competition to decide dominance of the enterprise cloud market. Anybody want to start a betting pool?
The meat of Monday's press conference was SAP announcing a partnership with Apple for client applications on iPhones and iPads (interesting), new cloud services (interesting), and rebranding its cloud service (yawn). We'll have an article on those developments in a few minutes, as soon as we have a stiff drink to get the image of Leukert and Ellison wrestling in Speedos out of our heads. Ew.
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— Mitch Wagner, 
, Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud
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