Comment Articles

Vendors get bombastic as customers get wary

Published: 28 May 2004 16:25 BST

"Henning Kagermann [SAP chief executive] talking about flexibility and adaptability is like [former French prime minister] Francois Mitterand talking about having a deep affection for American tourists. It's not true. Just because they say it's true doesn't make it true."

That's what PeopleSoft chief executive Craig Conway said during his keynote at his company's annual Executive Leadership Summit earlier this month. Conway also accused Kagermann of cribbing his speech at the SAP SAPPHIRE conference from a presentation he gave earlier this year.

The gloves are off as PeopleSoft has concluded its acquisition of J.D. Edwards, cementing its position as the clear #2 enterprise application provider behind SAP. Conway feels more confident that it can fend off Oracle's recently lowered hostile take over bid, and now has his sights set on an "assault on Mount SAP".

I asked Linda Lazor, vice president of global product marketing at PeopleSoft, to provide some specifics regarding Conway's remarks. She described SAP as lacking in total ownership experience (TOE), which she defined as cost benefits in terms of fewer IT staff required, speed of implementation, usability and ongoing operations and maintenance. For example, PeopleSoft claims that it has seen a 30 percent faster average time to complete over 140 key user tasks.

She also claimed that PeopleSoft has leapfrogged SAP with predictive analytics in PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 and demand driven manufacturing, which allows companies to more accurately devise supply chain scenarios and to respond more quickly to changes in demand. She cited some independent studies and customer comments to support her arguments.

SAP, Oracle, Siebel, Microsoft, IBM and others could come up with counter-claims, positive comments about themselves and disparaging remarks about PeopleSoft and each other. It's part of the smackdown American business culture. However, the bombast tends to make vendors' claims even more suspect than those made during civil discourse.

PeopleSoft crowed that it has reduced the number of steps to deploy application updates by 80 percent and disparaged SAP's track record in that area. SAP did recently introduce a change management toolset to reduce the complexity and employee hours required for new product installations and patching. It sounds like good competition yielding better products and services, as well as some mud-slinging.