SAP Vs. Oracle: Key Is Agents + AI + Data, Not Infrastructure!

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I compared the diverging strategies
of SAP and Oracle as the AI revolution reshapes enterprise tech.


Highlights


00:22 — SAP versus Oracle. It was interesting on
SAP's recent Q3 earnings call: the financial analysts seemed to
be really preoccupied with this notion — was SAP going to get
into the hyperscale business? Or was the fact that Oracle is in
the cloud infrastructure business something that SAP sees as a
disadvantage? I think those are entirely the wrong questions.


01:00 — SAP is never going to go in that
direction. Where SAP's future is — and what CEO Christian Klein
kept coming back to over and over, and I believe very
persuasively — is it's all about the data, and AI, and agents,
and the way that apps are evolving to pull all of that together.
It's about the business data cloud. It's about certain
partnerships.


01:45 — It reported a 22% increase in cloud
revenue, but in constant currency, that was 27%. Its current
cloud backlog was up about 27%. So, strong numbers for them —
much, much faster than Oracle's apps business is growing. But
Oracle thinks it is going to be ahead on the AI front, and with
the database, infrastructure, and its vertical market apps, it
thinks it's going to have a real case to be made here.


02:27 — But from SAP’s side, Klein was asked
about the hyperscale business. Really? His point was: no, no, no,
this is not going to happen. Instead, we're going to double down
— triple down — at SAP on the things that we do best and that our
customers are looking for us to deliver.


03:44 — A big point that Klein made about this —
and why he's so confident about SAP's ability as he said, we are
seeing more and more that the buying decisions are being made
around business outcomes. That's the focus. Certainly, the CIO is
involved, but the decisions are moving up into the C-suite and
the boards of directors.


05:08 — I think the competitive dynamics between
SAP and Oracle are going to really intensify over the next two or
three years because the opportunity here around the AI
Revolution, with agents, AI data, and applications, is incredibly
big and powerful.


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