UPDATED: Looking to capitalize on the uncertainty caused by Oracle’s Agassi also noted that SAP’s tool offering within NetWeaver is
$10.3 billion acquisition
of PeopleSoft, SAP AG acquired TomorrowNow, which provides maintenance
and support for PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards (JDE) customers.
Financial terms of the deal for Bryan, Texas-based TomorrowNow were not made
public. But officials said the purchase is the lynchpin for SAP to
accelerate Safe Passage, a program to help SAP customers running solutions
from PeopleSoft and JDE to move to SAP’s enterprise resource planning
solution, mySAP ERP.
Bill McDermott, president and CEO of SAP America, pledged on a conference
call to provide customers maintenance and software support at 17 percent for
PeopleSoft and JDE solutions.
Shai Agassi, a SAP executive board member, provided a practical example. If
customers have a $1 million PeopleSoft contract and want to migrate to
mySAP ERP with the same number of seats, they would earn a 75 percent credit on
their original $1 million acquisition. In money terms, this means they would receive a $750,000
credit and pay up $250,000 to get MySAP and NetWeaver, he said.
Their maintenance from this point is 17 percent of the $1 million, meaning
they’re going down to $170,000, which is less than the 22 percent it would cost
for them to move to Oracle.
So, SAP would charge a maintenance fee of 17 percent on the value of the mySAP
ERP license. For that same 17 percent, SAP will also maintain customers’
PeopleSoft and JDE installations through TomorrowNow while they are
migrating to mySAP ERP.
The offering will initially be directed at the 4,000 companies running SAP
who also run PeopleSoft and JDE software, McDermott said.
“Oracle’s acquisitions of PeopleSoft and JDE is forcing customers to be very
uncertain about the future of their software systems and the support for
those systems, as well as the future of their product architecture,” McDermott said.
“Customers are telling us time and again that this is very disruptive.”
To be sure, SAP’s move is a strategic play to keep the distance between
itself — the No. 1 provider of enterprise applications in the world — and
Oracle, which is looking to battle SAP for that distinction. While Oracle
has a long way
to go, its purchase of PeopleSoft and JDE made it the clear No. 2
applications provider.
SAP’s maneuver comes a day after Oracle launched
the merged company at its headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif. Oracle CEO
Larry Ellison pledged to offer 10 years of PeopleSoft and JDE support.
Oracle hopes customers will be won over by Project Fusion,
the company’s Java-base application architecture that combines
Oracle, PeopleSoft and JDE.
Agassi also refuted charges Oracle made during the Project Fusion launch that SAP
does not have a standards-based platform.
He said SAP has a platform — NetWeaver — that supports Java. NetWeaver is a
J2EE-based, open platform that is integrated and interoperable with
Microsoft’s .NET.
based on the Eclipse platform, while “Oracle’s offering is based on a
proprietary version of JBuilder.”
SAP Buys PeopleSoft Support Provider
