SAP withdraws guidance as loses share to Oracle

(By Anthony Miller) SAP revoked its licence sales revenue guidance today in the face of “uncertainties surrounding the current economic and business environment”. I have yet to pore through the 24-page 3Q08 results release and the 43-slide presentation in detail, but what immediately caught my eye was SAP’s loss of market share to archrival Oracle evident in the chart. SAP is very much an ‘all our eggs in one basket’, build-it-yourself ERP player (but not in the business intelligence space, though), whereas Oracle has taken the ‘patchwork quilt’ approach with a much more diversified product set. While you can argue that SAP therefore has the better integrated application portfolio, Oracle has so many more ‘touch points’ in client organisations that give it a better chance of selling something, anything, in these troubled times. Anyway, I shall add more later if I can find anything else interesting in SAP’s release.