John Wookey tells why Oracle and SAP can't catch up with Salesforce

May 28, 2012 | Author: Sandeep Sharma


The cloud race Oracle vs SAP goes on. Oracle has bought (for $300 million) one more SaaS-provider - Vitrue, which provides the social networks monitoring service. In the meantime, this show (Oracle vs SAP) now has an interesting commentator - John Wookey. This guy once worked as vice-president for Oracle and led the development of SaaS-package Fusion. But at that time Larry Ellison thought that "Cloud is just water vapour", so John didn't bring this development to the end and left Oracle to SAP. In SAP, he was in charge of building the SaaS ERP system Business ByDesign. At this time, John managed to launch the system to commercial phase, but this project also appeared to be unsuccessful. Now John Wookey works ... in Salesforce as a vice president for social applications and explains why (despite the record SaaS acquisitions) Oracle and SAP can't compete with Salesforce.

First of all, (according to Wookiee) Oracle and SAP have initially wrong goal. Their goal - is to catch up with Salesforce. This is wrong. The right goal - is to create applications that users actually like.

Second, both companies have an obsession - to provide a unified suite of applications on a single platform. However, their suites not only consist of apps purchased here and there, but also of on-premise and on-demand components. Combining them into single platform is only very difficult, but also wrong, says John. Now companies want quickly solve specific problems with specific services, rather than dive into overall automation projects, that can last for years without any result.

And third reason is because Oracle and SAP have a tradition to build applications around the goal to control business processes (whether it's CRM or HRM). In result, they are loved by executives, but end users do not want to use them. In contrasthe, the Salesforce's philosophy - is to create applications that will be useful for end users and help them to do the job, but not make them work for the app.

See also: Top 10 Online CRM software

Author: Sandeep Sharma
Sandeep is a marketing expert with a wealth of knowledge in various domains: customer relationship management, social media management, advertising, search engine optimization, website building, Sandeep has established himself as a multifaceted professional. He honed his skills while working at Salesforce and Hubspot, where he gained invaluable insights into the industry. Now, as the proud owner of a small advertising consulting agency, Sandeep continues to provide innovative and effective strategies to businesses, helping them thrive in the competitive landscape of digital marketing. You can contact Sandeep via email sandeep@liventerprise.com