Last week, SAP unveiled an entirely new line of applications that represent the company’s first foray into the “software as a service” (SaaS) market. As the world’s largest enterprise application vendor, SAP has the potential to take the SaaS market by storm with its latest offering and challenge Oracle in a new product segment in the process. However, it will take years of work and a little luck for SAP to become a leading SaaS player.
The new applications, known as SAP Business ByDesign (or BBD for short), took four years and roughly $400 million for SAP to build from scratch. By starting from a clean slate, SAP was able to design BDD using a “no compromises” service-oriented architecture (SOA). While the applications are new, they run on SAP’s existing NetWeaver middleware platform and leverage its support for SOA. Like similar products from Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and other SaaS vendors, BBD is only available as a hosted offering.
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While some industry observers are wondering whether Oracle can keep growing at its torrid pace, the company is showing no indications of slowing down. Last week, the software giant announced quarterly earnings and revenue that exceeded the forecasts of financial analysts. Oracle also reported exceptionally strong growth in sales in its applications group, of which JD Edwards is a part.
In what has become something of a tradition, Oracle chalked up financial figures last week that closed the distance between it and its archrival SAP. For the first quarter of its fiscal year 2008, the company announced that its net income grew by 25 percent to $840 million. In similar fashion, revenues grew by a strong 26 percent to $4.5 billion. By contrast, SAP grew its net income by 8 percent and revenues by 10 percent in its most recent quarterly report.
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Over the last year, Oracle has been quietly stepping up efforts to promote its Fusion Middleware to its application customers. From our company’s viewpoint, those efforts are starting to bear fruit. For instance, we have seen a growing number of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers asking about Oracle’s “Red Stack” (an industry phrase that distinguishes Fusion Middleware from IBM’s “Blue Stack” of WebSphere middleware). We have also seen several EnterpriseOne sites deploy their first Fusion Middleware products.
Now that the the Red Stack is popping up at JD Edwards shops, I want to make you aware of two things. First, Oracle is going to use its upcoming OpenWorld conference to honor application customers that are deploying Fusion Middleware. To do that, the vendor will present the Oracle Innovation Award to selected companies that are integrating their Oracle applications with the Red Stack. If you are one of those companies (or know one of them), you can nominate your company for the award at a web site that Oracle has set up for the purpose. If your nomination is accepted, you will receive one free pass to OpenWorld and be honored at an awards banquet. You may also be featured in a cover story in Oracle’s Profit Magazine.
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In case you have not heard, Oracle has relaunched the once-popular Advisor series of webcasts on topics of interest to JD Edwards customers. The webcasts, which were running full tilt back when JD Edwards was part of PeopleSoft, were shelved once Oracle acquired the latter company. Recently, however, Oracle revived the series and is using it to educate customers on topics ranging from product costing to multi-currency payments to compliance issues.
While the EnterpriseOne team will hold a handful of webcasts in the coming months, the World team has over two dozen events planned for this year. This includes a series of webcasts in December that will cover year-end processing topics. If you’re a World user, you will probably find at least several of the events in the following list to be well worth attending.
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If your company uses (or plans to use) Hewlett-Packard Integrity servers running on Intel Itanium 2 processors, I have good news for you. Oracle just announced that it has extended support for these servers to users of EnterpriseOne 8.11 SP1. The move by the software giant creates a new server option that was previously limited to shops running EnterpriseOne 8.12.
Of course, there are some software requirements that you must meet to run EnterpriseOne 8.11 SP1 on these Itanium 2 servers. First off, you must run your applications on the HP/UX operating system . . . in other words, no Windows allowed. Second, you need to use EnterpriseOne Tools 8.96 at the 1.4 release level. If you meet these qualifications, you can run the following EnterpriseOne tiers on the Itanium 2-powered Integrity line:
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When local and regional governments put out RFPs for business software, many overlook JD Edwards applications as viable options. That, however, is something that Oracle is trying to change with EnterpriseOne. Over the last several months, the company has been quietly focusing its resources on promoting EnterpriseOne among local governments. In response, we have just published a new white paper that examines what EnterpriseOne has to offer the public sector. You can download the paper from our white papers section or from Oracle’s web site.
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