After closing the Sun deal and winning the America’s Cup race, Oracle chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, has the smug turned up past 11 all the way to 13. “Every quarter we grab huge chunks of market share from SAP,” Ellison said in the statement accompanying Oracle’s financials. “SAP’s most recent quarter was the best quarter of their year, only down 15 per cent, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21 per cent. But SAP is well ahead of us in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while we only had one.”
“We really think that SAP has lost its way, and if they don’t want to be number one, we do,” Ellison said in the conference call. Ellison said that Oracle would deliver its Fusion applications both on premise and as a service over the Web this year, something the company can do because it is built on Java and has rich industry functionality. SAP, by contrast, said Ellison, is based on the ABAP language, a 25-year-old technology that is at the heart of its application software, and SAP is not keeping pace with industry-specific functions. “We think SAP is vulnerable and we can take them on in a number of industries,” Ellison said.
- source (Emphasis mine)
Ellison has a nack for delivering quotables.
