SAP dodges bullet in Q4
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Software sales lead the show SAP shares were up more than four per cent yesterday as the software company released prelimary figures showing a 10 per cent growth in revenues.â¦
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Hotel operator caps off a successful turnaround year by topping Q4 estimates.
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SAP on Wednesday introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management software for midsized companies.
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(InfoWorld) - As Oracle executives patted themselves on the back for their company's reporting another strong financial quarter, they also couldn't resist having a go at prime applications rival SAP. "Oracle had another very strong quarter," Safra Catz, co-president and chief financial officer at Oracle, said Tuesday during a conference call with analysts to discuss the vendor's fiscal 2007Â first-quarter results. "We had our strongest first-quarter license growth in more than five years by gaining market share," she added. Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle, said the company had won 88 deals going head-to-head with SAP during the quarter, including customer wins with Electrolux, Lockheed Martin, and U.S. Steel. Some of the business is what he termed "winbacks" of business Oracle had previously lost to SAP, including a strategic win at Wal-Mart Stores. In recent months, the bitterÂ competitive back-and-forthÂ between Oracle and SAP has reached a crescendo. Oracle jumped on SAP's July announcement ofÂ lower than expected salesÂ and cited it as proof that the applications vendor's growth had stalled. SAP retorted that the results were a slight blip and not indicative of a major issue with its performance, which it believes remains strong. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, cites two factors that he believes are working in Oracle's favor over SAP: its Java-based middleware and its aggressive focus on getting industry-specific expertise and products through acquisitions. Ellison claimed that Oracle's Fusion middleware is "years ahead" of SAP's NetWeaver integration platform. "NetWeaver is still relatively new and still incomplete," he said. Oracle's so-called "hot pluggable" or component-based Fusion middleware strategy is paying off, Phillips said. Typically, the company sells one or two of its middleware components into a customer account with the hope that over time that customer will expand their use of Oracle's middleware. Turning to applications, Ellison criticized SAP's recent decision toÂ retain the current versionÂ of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, mySAP ERP 2005, through 2010 and provide new functionality through regularly issued optional enhancement packages. "SAP has delayed the next release of its applications until 2010," he said. "They'll be two full years behind our Fusion release." Oracle is working on a new suite of enterprise applications, known as Project Fusion, which is due out in 2008. By contrast, SAP executives have positioned the company's move to a more modular approach to product upgrades as being driven by customers' demands to pick and choose functionality. This quarter will be the last time Oracle provides separate database and middleware growth figures, Catz said. In the first quarter, database revenue grew 10 percent, while middleware rose 56 percent. In future, Oracle will adopt the practice of IBM and Microsoft and not break out those sales, she said. Looking to the second quarter, Catz expects Oracle's net income to grow by between 13 percent and 17 percent as revenue increases by 22 to 24 percent. She forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $0.22. Those predictions don't take into account any specific charges likely to occur in the quarter.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Net income rose to 291 million euros ($366 million), or 94 cents a share, from 252 million euros, or 81 cents, a year earlier, Walldorf, Germany-based SAP said in a statement.
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Mobie move With Oracle and SAP going at each other last week, Sybase has updated its Unwired Enterprise strategy to help put more SAP business applications into the field.â¦
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Wabash National Corp. is in the process of stabilizing a faulty SAP implementation, which the company blamed for a sharp drop in second-quarter profits.
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Intuit (INTU:Nasdaq - news - research) reported a bottom line on Wednesday that was better than analysts&#39; fourth-quarter estimates, but it offered mixed guidance for its upcoming fiscal year.
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Business software maker SAP, which employs 450 people in Dublin and Galway, has said that a strong performance in its European activities helped boost earnings in the third quarter, which came out higher than analysts&#39; expectations.
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The Motley Fool - It appears that Larry Ellison took to the stage last week with more drama in mind than he had the right to perform. Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News) really did produce a strong quarter, but the CEO may have been speaking with feet of clay when he came out strongly in regard to rival enterprise-software developer SAP (NYSE: S News). An SAP representative took the time to give me his company's side of the story, to which I've added my own Foolish touch.
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SAP AG has benefited from the market uncertainty created by the long battle between Oracle Corp. and Peoplesoft Inc. Now that the battle is over, the dominant business applications maker doesn&#39;t see the good times ending.
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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SAP AG reported an 8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses.
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Software maker SAP AG said Wednesday its profit slipped in the fourth quarter even as sales edged higher, and forecast revenue growth from software sales and services of about 14 percent in 2008.
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Q3 inventory corrections put pressure on vendors to perform in Q4
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Passes bump in the road, sees another ahead SanDisk reported a huge swing in fourth quarter income today, but issued a "cautious" outlook for the upcoming quarter due to competitive pricing and an unstable economy.â¦
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InfoWorld - SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies' software will take longer to achieve.