SAP UK claims 'business as usual'

SAP UK has spoken out about the ongoing Oracle lawsuit against SAP corporate subsidiary, TomorrowNow, claiming that its customers are unconcerned about the ongoing legal battle between the two software titans.

The US lawsuit alleges that TomorrowNow staff hacked into an Oracle support website and downloaded content to provide cut-rate support to Oracle customers. And last week, SAP admitted to "some inappropriate downloads", but said it never had access to the content.

Richard Mills, SAP UK retail industry principal told IT PRO that customers he had spoken did not seem to think the Oracle spat would hamper business. "I've heard nothing from customers about it," he said. "It doesn't seem to bother them."

Instead, Mills was keen to talk up the fact that the appetite for consolidation of specialist enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions on its applications platform had not diminished among retailers in particular. "There is something of a perception that SAP doesn't do retail, but we have been very successful with retailers in the last five years and now have 50 large-enterprise customers in the UK."

He cited Harrods, Somerfield and Figleaves.com among the successful UK customer base. "We're going head-to-head with the traditional competition - Oracle Retail, JDA, Aldata and Microsoft Dynamics - and we're winning," said Mills. "This is because it's not just about functionality, but also about how stable the company is as a provider, where they want their business to go in future and how we can help them take it there. Now we see the opportunities in the mid-market."

SAP recently announced the development of a hosted version of its ERP product for small-to-medium sized businesses, codenamed A1S. But Mills said retailers are still keen to keep their operations in house. "We have the ability to host operations already, but some retailers still want to own the systems," added Mills. "But we see the demand for hosted growing elsewhere and are responding to it."

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