The SAP – Informatica Relationship

The SAP – Oracle competition to be the top business solution in enterprise resource planning continues.

And while Oracle does its part in the competition by going on a shopping spree acquiring other software solutions companies and products, SAP is not just standing and watching. Of course we know of SAP's in-house innovations, but it does not stop at its lawn. But unlike Oracle, SAP is not acquiring, it is partnering.

A current development is SAP's partnership with Informatica to include the latter's management tools with some of the former's enterprise resource planning and analytics products. This new tie will definitely give business enterprises better tools for analyzing data stored in legacy systems (yes, it is hard to get away from legacy system with today's prohibitive costs of installing a new system) and third party systems.

Informatica Corporation is a niche owner in the field of data integration software and services for various businesses, industries and government organizations, including telecommunications, health care, insurance, and financial services while SAP, well, who does not know that is the number provider of enterprise resource management solutions?

This deal is sort of a symbiotic relationship: this will boost SAP's marketing campaign because Informatica's applications will help the company sell into larger enterprises with heterogeneous environments while Informatica can take on the exiting popularity of the SAP as an industry giant an all of its 40,000-plus installed client base. This deal will also make SAP have easier access to sales into large client accounts without having to, uhhm, bruise is ego by partnering with Oracle.

The deals includes embedding Informatica's PowerCenter, PowerExchange and Metadata Manager software into SAP's performance management and business analytic applications and the NetWeaver platform for master data management and business intelligence. The last two mentioned applications are among the fastest growing products of SAP. This growth is indicative of the trend in handling high data volumes with increased fragmentation of data sources.

For years, dealing with huge bulks of data coming from disparate data sources have posed a constant challenge for data warehousing and business intelligence systems. But this collaboration of two industry leaders can help problems related to disparate data management by correlating isolated data stores in meaningful and efficient ways. For example, manufacturers can have a better tool in correlating error rates for a particular product with batches from various raw materials suppliers. Data mining cannot do what-if analysis but the SAP – Informatica collaboration can. Another benefit to be derived is the advantage of a metadata management application which can make it easy for companies to have an audit trail of data sources and changes to the data.

While this partnership is hinted at warding off competition from SAP's closest rival Oracle, they are not the only ones in the arena of business enterprise and the many other are not just standing by cheering for either SAP or Oracle. HP is also building a similar software solution. IBM has also partnered with Oracle in coming up with yet similar products.

Oracle and in the face of the planet

Oracle has long been a leader in global business solutions. But when one mentions the words Oracle and ERP, the idea that easy comes to mind is all those shopping spree that Oracles has done in the past few years in a desperate move to outshine its closes competitor SAP as the number provider of ERP solutions. But as I blogged in the past, I do not see anything wrong with these shopping sprees. My thing is that if Oracle can afford it and the potential acquisition gets a good deal, then fine. This healthy competition between SAP and Oracle will result in the consumers benefiting in the end. This is what business competition is all about.

Perhaps the United Nations thinks the same. There is nothing wrong with Oracle's moves. The important thing is the quality of the products. So much so that the United Nations development Programme (UNDP) has deployed and implemented an Oracle ERP module on a mass scale spreading out to all continents. This partnership is getting stronger with new efforts in trying to increase the user base and penetrating new segments in the market. It has been reported that UNDP has saved about 10 percent in time and money and has decided to embark on a new campaign of using PeopleSoft.


The romance between Sun Microsystems and Oracle has served greater benefits to the consumer public. New developments spring from the partnership include some products designed to benefit organizations in all aspects from economical to procedural. One of these benefits is the an implementation of ERP which does away with so many servers at the local level. Small and medium sized companies can install a smaller number of computer servers to facilitate their operations and thus save money.

An example of the "beneficiaries" of Oracle is a hospital company in Ohio City. Because of better hospital resource management, there has been an increase in the number of lives saved or reduced extent of loss or intensity of injury incurred on people. But along the way to the hospital's success in better management, the encountered problem with an Oracle implementation failed. But the mistake was not mainly due to the inefficiency or Oracle but in the people implementing it who depended heavily on the software as a magical cure it all remedy even to basic problems requiring only a simple common sense. In social speak, this incident is called an area for new lessons learned. Oracle ERP softwares are simply mechanical instructions and for now, they cannot totally "think for themselves".

Oracle's easy adaptability to local markets has greatly helped smaller companies in poorest countries. In Brazil, Oracle has fast become a favorite ERP application as many companies have experience the benefits. Because of globalization, many companies from poorest countries and smaller economies have to face the industry giants from the industrialized nations. But with the help of ERP solutions, the competition may not be as tough as could be expected.

ERP Job Salaries

I remember that in my blogs a couple of days ago, I mentioned that SAP professionals should get security certifications in order to get a higher raise. Yes, a higher raise despite the fact that SAP professionals in particular and ERP professionals in general are some of the best paid people in the computing industry.

While surfing the internet today, I came across this salary range for ERP Project Manager www.salary.com which reflected that as of April 2007, the median rate is at $114,194 per annum. And this rate is just for base salary; this does not even include yet other benefits and bonuses!


The website of Salary.com has a neat sort of search engine for determining salary. I tried to get specific salary for an ERP programmer in the business services industry in New York, New York for a company with $5M - $10M in revenue. I learned that the salary for the specific ERP programmer is around $100,000 per annum. This is really a neat feature and you can try it yourself and see where you stand and what you want to achieve in an ERP career or any other career not just within the information technology industry!

And then I got a detailed ERP job salary range in UK from this site www.itjobswatch.co.uk. Oracle ERP over the last 3 month to 14 September 2007 with a comparison to the same period last year shows the Average Maximum Salary for Oracle ERP guys is £56,365 compared to the same period last year's rate of £49,263. General Business Applications professionals in the UK has Average Maximum Salary of £58,058 compared to the same period last year's rate of £57,153.

During the past six months, the same website determined the Top IT skills in the UK and the top 10 are the following:

1. Oracle tied with General ERP
2. Finance
3. Oracle applications
4. Oracle EBS
5. SQL
6. Oracle Financials tied with Oracle 11i
7. Project Management tied with Degree
8. Oracle 8/8i
9. Oracle 9i
10. SAP ERP


I also came across http://answers.yahoo.com with someone asking the question: "What's average salary in the USA for SAP ERP functional consultant with more than 8 years experiences?" This question was posted some time in March 2007.

Two guys answered. One said more generically: "You can earn around 100 000$ per year." Another guy who claimed to have 10 years of experience with SAP gave a more specific answer: "I can't talk about someone with 8 years experience, but ten years will get you $90,000 to $120,000. Big 5 firms will look in the above-mentioned range. $100,000 would be a good target for 10 years experience. The good old days before Y2K are long gone."

In most of my searches, I have discovered that certification is indeed important in order for one to get a higher rate. Yeah, many people may raise their eyebrows but this is a reality. But above all, experience is still the biggest gauge for salary rate.

Boosting Oracle's Communications Global Business Unit

Oracle announced on September 2, 2007 that it has plans to buy Netsure Telecom Limited, a Dublin, Ireland based communications intelligence and analytics provider. According to some, the transaction will be closed sometime in late September this year. But as of the moment when the deal is still open, both companies are still operating independently.
For sure, this acquisition, which I hope will really materialize as soon as possible, will give Oracle's Communications Global Business Unit a boost. The Oracle's Communications Global Business Unit has already been known in the industry as great tool for delivering compelling communications-specific applications to service providers.

According to Oracle Senior Vice President and General Manager, Bhaskar Gorti, "The addition of Netsure's products to Oracle's comprehensive communications applications suite is expected to help Oracle's customers improve network utilization, optimize capacity planning and financial modeling, and streamline end-to-end network lifecycle management."
Gorti further said "In conjunction with Oracle's ERP, supply chain, inventory management and network discovery solutions, Oracle plans to provide service providers the ability to improve their network ROI and increase their operational efficiency as they launch, deploy and profit from next-generation IP services."

When Netsure finally works in conjunction with Oracle Communications application product suite when the acquisition shall have been completed, the new combination will enhance an implementing companies business intelligence capacity and analytics for their network domain. Netsure's solutions are both product based and open standards compliant. This means that the capabilities of Netsure's products can easily integrate with Oracle's network inventory, provisioning, and financial asset management applications. With this integration, companies are expected to have enabled service providers in order to improve modeling and optimization, proactive network planning and as a result, operational costs will definitely be reduced while utilization and efficiency of both leased and owned network will be increased.

Netsure's has been backed by an executive team that has extensive experience in the oftware and telecommunications industries. Active Network Optimisation product suite has been popular among big companies in Europe for its reliability in such diverse aspects as network investment, capacity utilization and planning efficiency, data integrity.

Professionals in the business solutions industry have been speculating that Oracle's acquisition spree has been borne out of its unrelenting quest to take the place of SAP as the largest software provider. In fact, Oracle has been investing heavily in the communications software area and has shelled out about 220 million dollars to snap up Portal Sofware.

Other companies that have picked up by Oracle include MetaSolve Software, Net4Call, HotSip and Telephony@Work. Oracle claimed that the move is about making an end-to-end packaged software suite which is designed for efficient process in the communication industry.

For some, this acquisition fee is unfair move in the competition as many want to capitalize on innovation from the in-house. For me, I don't really care much. If Oracle has the money for acquiring other solutions and integrating into their own, then so be it. In the people, most business people really care about the totality of the package and what it does. They don’t care much about the skeletal system as long as the system as a whole makes their lives a lot easier.

The Oracle Fusion

When Oracle Corporation has announced that it will release a new suite of ERP related applications dubbed as Fusion, the news greatly clarified the vision of Oracle for its applications strategies which has been a point of concern in relation to customers of PeopleSoft, which Oracle bought for $10 billion. Fusion was expected to serve as a point of migration for customers all the three Oracle platforms.

Oracle Fusion is a middleware. It is portfolio of standards bases software application products. Oracle Fusion spans many services which include J2EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. But lot of the products which are being marketed under the Fusion Middleware banner are not really middleware products themselves. Fusion is just some sort of re-branding move for many products of Oracle outside of their core database and applications software offerings.

Another intended use of Oracle Fusion is to support the development, deployment, and management of Service-Oriented Architecture. This middleware can easily leverage existing software investments such as from IBM, Microsoft and SAP (All of them are Oracle's competitors in ERP), through a pluggable architecture.

Oracle Fusion is a Java-based, service-oriented architecture that has an automated upgrade process from PeopleSoft, Oracle and J.D. Edwards applications. The Oracle Fusion Architecture can provide a robust, very high performance and highly available computing environment. With all these factors that the Oracle Fusion can deliver, a business can have a rich catalog of standard business processes in a wide range of areas such as CRM, ERP, and supply chain management. Evolution is something that cannot be avoided in business as nobody would want to set up a business without having to grow. With Oracle fusion, a company can have a dynamic business process portfolio that can evolve with the company.

Oracle has been careful in defining the line between Oracle and PeopleSoft as both could be though of as one but they need separate marketing image as well. While working on the Fusion, Oracle has made sure it maintained some separation between its Oracle and PeopleSoft development teams.

Oracle Fusion will surely be a great challenge to Oracle's nearest rival in the ERP industry – SAP AG. Oracle has seen Fusion as a revitalizing factor in its aggressive pursuing of leadership in the business applications market. The applications market has a wide array of areas for software solution development including software solutions used for managing corporate functions like sales, human resources and supplier relationships.

As a watcher of competitions among these software giants, I get excited everyday with new developments. SAP is now aggressively marketing its SAP xApps, a range of software products targeted at specific industries and have smaller footprints compared to other ERP implementations. Examples of the xApps include SAP xApp Cost and Quotation Management (SAP xCQM), SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII), SAP xApp Resource and Portfolio Management (SAP xRPM), SAP xApp Integrated Exploration and Production (SAP xIEP). Despite the develop of a variety of business solutions, the development of software solutions to "Fuse" these things together is always catching up.