Corporate Competition
Oracle is aiming to win the mobile enterprise resource planning (ERP) system establishment project to be launched by Samsung Electronics in return for its assistance in Samsung Electronics’ enterprise mobile business. But Samsung has suggested no deal for a couple of months.
At present, Oracle is the world’s number one enterprise database company, which means it is an essential partner for Samsung’s mobile enterprise business. In addition, Samsung Electronics can promote the sales of its smartphones in the enterprise market by making use of Oracle’s enterprise customer database management systems.
For Oracle, Samsung Electronics is also a very important partner to help it catch up with SAP in the ERP market. “A large investment is required for Oracle to reshape the PC-based database management systems of its existing customers on a mobile basis, and Samsung Electronics should pay for it, but the discussions are showing little progress,” said an industry insider.
In the meantime, SAP recently released a new ERP product, SAP HANA, and Oracle’s concerns are rising, as it is likely to take the place of the Oracle databases in Samsung Electronics. The SAP HANA is designed to be capable of driving the ERP only on the database platform of SAP. According to industry sources, SAP is providing its database almost for free for customers using its ERP.
Samsung’s database replacement means that Oracle may lose one of its most important customers. Besides, Samsung Electronics is cooperating with SAP as well as Oracle in the field of mobile enterprise solutions. Under the circumstances, SAP might take all of the sales to be generated from Samsung in a variety of fields like mobile ERP and cloud computing.
Samsung Electronics is weighing SAP against Oracle these days. Its partnership with Oracle is indispensable for the penetration of the enterprise mobile market, but the enterprise mobile solutions it has been working on with SAP since last year are attractive enough as well. In this context, Samsung Electronics Vice President Lee In-jong visited both of the headquarters of SAP and Oracle in February.
Moreover, Samsung Electronics is the company with the largest number of ABAP developers and managers in the world. ABAP is a programming language of SAP. Samsung Electronics can save development and operation costs when setting up its mobile ERP with SAP. However, significant costs are to likely be incurred if it opts for Oracle.