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by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff
Posted on Monday, September 04, 2006 6:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | Oracle's most recent financials show a temporary role reversal in the applications software market with healthy license revenues for the SAP rival, while SAP reported lower-than-expected results during its most recent quarter. |
| Keywords: | Oracle, SAP, enterprise applications market, SMB |
Since Oracle Corp. (Redwood Shores, CA) launched its acquisition strategy 21 months ago with the purchase of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, the company has played the role of financial underachiever to archrival SAP AG's market-share juggernaut. While SAP (Walldorf, Germany) recorded a succession of major double-digit growth quarters -- allowing the company to build its market share to 43% in 2005 compared to 19% for Oracle, according to AMR Research -- Oracle often struggled to achieve organic growth in its applications business. Following release of their most recent financial results, however, the rivals' roles have reversed, at least temporarily. During its most recent quarter, ended May 31, Oracle saw new applications software license revenue grow 83% compared to the same period a year before. That helped the company increase total applications software revenues by 66% during the quarter. SAP, on the other hand, reported lower-than-expected results during its quarter, ended June 30. Blaming a failure to translate a number of booked orders into revenue, SAP reported that overall revenue for the quarter grew by 9% and software revenue was up just 8% compared to the year-earlier quarter. Those figures fell well short of SAP's recent strong performance. During the quarter ended March 31, for example, SAP reported that software revenues were up 22% and total revenues had surged 18%. [Click to continue] |
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