OK, posting about the SAP vs. Oracle software theft battle is easy news after last week’s tour de force on IT and business news sites. Having said that, “SAP blog land” remained fairly quiet – I guess a lot of SAP bloggers who are employed by or closely related to SAP can’t or won’t post about this.

Instead, I decided to post a few links I consider a worthwhile read in the news avalanche that was SAP vs Oracle:

• Nicolas Carr made some great posts about it here and more detailed here.
• ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett puts emphasis on the exposure of software maintenance cost elements – and how it could hurt Oracle in long-term.
• and finally Joshua Greenbaum – also hinting to costs exposure

If you need to know more… there is always the whole 43 page document.

John Blau of IDG News Service held a short interview with Vishal Sikka, SAP’s Senior Vice President of Architecture. 2 statements stood out for me:

Asked about the CRM on-demand offering Sikka says:

“What you see in our CRM on-demand offering is a significantly easier product to use through ways such as preconfiguration, fewer functions and taking massive advantage of underlying infrastructure. You’ll see us do things that go far beyond Salesforce.com. You’ll see us starting to work with some of the “cloud” platforms like Amazon and Google. We haven’t yet announced any relationships but you’ll start to see us doing things of this sort.”

It will be interesting to see what the collaboration with cloud platforms will entail.

When asked about the cooperation with Microsoft and Duet in particular, he responded:

“We have different development philosophies. Microsoft is much more volume oriented and more consumer focused. But we have a great relationship with them.”

This statement puzzles me slightly. OK, Microsoft is to a large extend putting software onto people’s desktop and the large majority of them are (end-) consumers, hence a larger installation base. But I can’t understand why the development philosophies are so different. I particularly don’t understand why MS is supposed to be more consumer focused. If I try to interpret this, does it mean -for example- MS puts more focus on UIs because they are more consumer oriented – and SAP less? Aren’t a lot of the great conversations that are happening on SDN and in the SAP Blogsphere trying to do exactly the opposite – making SAP more consumer focused (think of the Wiimote experiment as a lighthearted example)?

ZDNet reports on SAPs reaction over Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion – what I find more interesting is the actual reasoning behind the deal that Oracle president Charles Phillips gave to ZDNet.

Hyperion’s software wraps up financial information into a dashboard and helps companies deliver their regulatory filings to the SEC. While CFOs may write checks for other applications they know Hyperion’s software well.

“There are a lot of other tools we have that we can sell. Normally the CIO reports to the CFO so that relationship was important,” said Phillips.

Oracle’s game plan: Use Hyperion’s access to the CFO office to sell other applications. CIOs are critical, but CFOs call the shots.

This reminded me of Dan McWeeney’s post on “SAP users of tomorrow“. Dan quite rightly emphasised the importance of UIs in the future and how they will influence key decision makers.

One thing I’d to add to this is that in my view Oracle is (for once) using a clever approach here: the CFOs are the ones who “sign the cheques”. I am probably out on a limb here, but my guess is that even in the future it will mostly be CIOs who are getting excited about a good UI – not the CFOs. So trying to get a communication route directly to the key people sounds like a plan to me.