Oracle fudging numbers: Sap

The competition in the enterprise resource planning solution space is getting intense with SAP's South Asian president and managing director Alan Sedghi on Tuesday accusing Oracle of "fudging" numbers to justify its claim of being number one in the enterprise market in the US.

"We acquired a company Tomorrow Now in the US, which supports JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers. Tomorrow Now will open an office in Singapore to cater to the Asia Pacific market soon this week. We are talking with them to open office in Bangalore to support Indian customers," Sedghi said.

SAP plans to use Tomorrow Now to provide maintenance to JDE customers in India who plan to shift to SAP. The company has claimed it has netted its first "dissatisfied" customer from Oracle in India.

SAP, which has grown over 70 per cent in licensed software in the last two years, is seeking to take advantage of the confusion among customers of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, which have been acquired by Oracle.

The company is offering 'Safe Passage' to customers willing to shift to SAP and for those who do not plan to shift immediately, it is hoping they will take up maintenance contract with Tomorrow Now till they decide to migrate.

"We are getting a lot of queries from JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers about our safe passage programme," he said.

Criticising Oracle for making "false" claims of being number one in the US, Sedghi said, "Oracle is a database company with lot of cash which is trying to buy its way into enterprise software space."

He said, while SAP was building enterprise software around processes, Oracle was trying to build business applications over database.