ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - Part One

I finally had some time today to get the first part of this article completed and I decided to post it as a sneak preview. I will expand on this topic and am planning to add a lot more information later.

1) What is ERP?

ERP stands for “Enterprise Resource Planning”. ERP is a software product that is capable of running and integrating multiple different organizational functions such as accounting/financials, human resources and payroll in a shared database. Without going much into detail on what this means, let me jump right into a real life example. I’m assuming that you know a little about the employment process, perhaps from your work experience.

Let’s say you are applying for a job. The process is pretty straightforward nowadays – you find a good position worth applying for either online or through other resources such as recruitment agencies, then submit your resume and wait for a call or email follow-up. After a while you get screened and interviewed by a company that is interested in your skills. Then, if you are the right candidate, you get hired.

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SAP vs Oracle?

I’m wondering who is going to win the battle. I’ve always been a fan of SAP and looking at the SAP/Oracle war I’m starting to wonder what will eventually happen between the two giants. Oracle has been buying companies like crazy – PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel are all under Oracle’s wings. Oracle is coming up with so called “Fusion” that will eliminate these different companies and their products and merge the technology into one plaform by 2008-2009 (yeah right).

My 2 cents on this:

  1. It will take many years for Oracle to be able to merge everything into one finished product. To be able to accomplish something like that, they would need full support from all child companies, including those that were the victims of hostile takeovers.
  2. Taking completely different pieces of software, written in different languages/styles and merging them together has always been ugly, no matter what the experts say.
  3. Oracle simply does not have the manpower to complete Fusion in a couple of years.
  4. Oracle is killing healthy competition by buying small ERP vendors.
  5. How the heck are they planning to convert all PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel users to Fusion? They are probably going to make them buy Fusion :)
  6. Oracle ERP sucks compared to MySAP 2005 (it’s a fact). It will take years for Oracle to develop something that works as beautifully as MySAP 2005 does.
  7. SAP should stop selling Oracle DB and move towards IBM DB2 for large enterprises and MSSQL 2005 for small to medium-size businesses. I don’t think developing a solid DB system is worth the effort for SAP at this point.