Courtesy of Prashanth Rai, I’ve got hold of a short Nucleus Research report entitled: SAP and Oracle: Who’s ready for small and medium sized business. On every measure, Oracle comes out on top. But worse than that from SAPs perspective, the report authors note:
As a group, all Oracle customers were in line to achieve a positive ROI.
The story was somewhat different for the SAP customers: in some cases, customers expected they would have to spend more to achieve ROI:
- “We are yet to see it… we’ll probably get ROI but with more work, and we’ll have to get some modules and do some more customization.”
- “I’m not so sure about ROI. SAP is very expensive for what we are getting. I’d need more people to use the system but I can’t justify the licenses because of the cost.”
Unfortunately, for many SAP customers the scale of ongoing costs was simply greater than the scale of benefits being achieved: 34 percent of SAP customers are unlikely to ever achieve a positive ROI without changes in their deployment, given that annual ongoing costs are greater than the value of benefits received.
The report authors correctly point out that SMBs are highly risk conscious, largely because they don’t have the financial bandwidth to accommodate implementations that over-run and require over-spend.
What the report did not examine were the root causes explaining the results. A clue might come from the fact that in this survey, 6 out of the 29 SAP customers were either supported by partners or their parent company. As SAP readies itself for A1S, it will need a cadre of solid partners to make those implementations sing. If this is an indication of partner quality then it will be in for a torrid time.
