Report finds SAP winning war with Oracle

SAP has stronger momentum than Oracle, due largely to its major head start in the business applications market. It also concludes that SAP has a better partnership strategy than Oracle and has done a better job of articulating the value of its technology to customers.
...customers who do not already have a major investment in either company -- those akin to swing voters in an election -- will probably be more likely to choose SAP going forward.

This is a pretty logical finding given SAP's history in the apps market. What's unclear to me about these findings is if the analysis included the SME market as well. If so, and if the partnership and swing voters assertions are correct, this bodes very well for SAP as SME go-to-market is heavily partner-based and there are plenty of potential customers with no major ERP/CRM systems.


Oracle's strong middleware platform and better support of open standards make it the right choice for customers who rely heavily on custom development in conjunction with packaged applications.

Interesting that Oracle came out stronger on the middleware platform. Is this because some of this "middleware" functionality is ecompassed in the database? If the rumors of a JBoss acquisition turn out to be true, this advantage would likely increase. In general, this finding has got to be good news for news for Oracle's Fusion Middleware marketing efforts

Also, I read the last part as "if you like developing a lot of custom code that may not be reusable, Oracle is for you." (sorry, had to get one dig in)