Microsoft and SAP to join forces against Oracle (Nov 18, 2009)
Microsoft and SAP announces to join forces against Oracle on the Performance Management (BPM) arena on Wednesday, November 18, 2009.
Wall Street Journal published on their blog today, announcing that Microsoft and SAP are joining forces to offer a one 'preferred' Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting solution to their customers. The SAP Budgeting, Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) product will be the solution of choice that Microsoft now will start offering to their clients across the globe. The benefits for Microsoft is obvious as they will expand their BI offering to include powerful write-back to all the BI cubes that is hosted on SQL Server. SAP will expand their market penetration into a market not previously served by the German giant of BPM solutions.
Microsoft has been without an integrated solution in BPM for Budgeting and Planning since they discontinued the Performance Point Planning offering in January of 2009. By tearing down corporate barricades, these two conglomerates realize that working together is a better strategic alliance than serving this market individually. Microsoft will make sure that the SAP offering is working on the Microsoft front-end and back-end framework, while SAP realizes that it might gain a competitive edge towards competition against IBM with Cognos / TM1 as well as Oracle with the Hyperion and Brio suite of BI and BPM solutions.
Microsoft is expected to gain significant momentum in the BI arena with the launch of Office 2010 and SQL Server 2010. When it comes to the ability to do write back and supporting complex corporate consolidations and budgeting solutions, Microsoft realizes it will benefit from the strategic relationship with SAP and become a serious BPM contender.
This is great news for corporations that have hard core requirements for Consolidation, multi-currency and budgeting functionality and will add to their suite of end-user BI offerings from Office and SQL Server.
In the last few months, SAP has been offering their SAP BPC suite at a discounted price to the mid-market. It is expected that this competitive pricing will continue, and that the pricing will go even lower with this strategic relationship with Microsoft. For the overall competitive market space, it is expected that this will benefit the upper-mid-market to large corporations as well with price competitive offerings. There are already thousands and thousands of SQL Server BI Cubes created for the purpose of Excel and Pivot table analytics, and it is expected that the SAP/Microsoft offering will make the ability to update the cubes and provide write-back functionality even further.
Look out for more updates from the blogs and the official release on Wednesday, November 18. 2009.