For a medium-sized SAP/JD Edwards shop looking to move up from R/3, what approach would you recommend in light of the Oracle-SAP slugfest? Take up SAP on its generous 75% rebate offer, or go with Oracle's new Off SAP program? Either way it sounds like a fairly sweet deal, but I know better than to trust sales reps from either side. Any suggestions for how to get started evaluating the options?
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Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
Congratulations on being in the catbird's seat -- you're definitely destined to get a sweet deal, one way or the other. Politics aside, your first duty is to assess which vendor can provide the best functionality specific to your industry and business needs. And the best way to assess their relative value is to talk to customers of each vendor. The closer the customer is to your business and industry the better. My recommendation would be to go through the ASUG user group for SAP and the IOUG for Oracle, just to make sure you're getting the most unbiased opinions possible.
Your other obligation is to really sort out the upgrade and/or migration costs, and try if at all possible to get a fixed bid from each vendor's SI partners. Don't forget training costs in the equation: The number one failure point in an implementation is inadequate training, and when the implementation involves a migration, there's no more important factor than making sure your users can hit the ground running.
This was first published in July 2005