SAP: We Had An 85% Win Rate Against Oracle

Following Larry Ellison's attack on SAP last month, SAP responded in its quarterly earnings call with a different version of who's winning the deals:

Matthew Hammond - Credit Suisse

The second question, and I guess it is the one that everyone is itching to ask but everyone is probably too polite, is could you give us some sort of feeling of the difference between what Oracle is saying in terms of the amount of deals they have won against you and the way that you are looking at? Because there is clearly quite some discrepancy.

Henning Kagermann, CEO

[...]From our friends, I think Leo has a lot of data. I can just say I was asked today several times about the market share gains. I think some of you have made this calculation and the mathematics, must think there is nobody more reliable than independent analysts. So therefore, I can only say take the same figures. What we do is we take our sales figures. We compare it to the Oracle Siebel entity last year, compared to the combined entities this year, then you know that SAP has really gained market share again.

What Leo is doing is, if we have some names, we look into our books and records and look if this is really a win or if it is just a name. I think Leo’s team did this very carefully this time. Leo.

Leo Apotheker, Executive Board Member, Global Field Operations

Yes, Henning, thank you for giving me this opportunity. We looked at the claim. As you know, Oracle claimed 88 head-to-head wins against SAP. They only identified certain names of those, which we of course proceeded to analyze in detail. Let me give you the detail of that analysis.

We chose not to compete on one of these deals. Six were not competitive situations, and all occurred before Q107 of August quarter, first quarter. Twelve of them we have no record on, so I cannot comment because we did not compete. We were not in the game. Seven were not a win against us. They must have counted some other wins. Four were indeed losses for us, so they did win four against us.

Just to put things into perspective, in this quarter, we had 247 competitive head-to-head against Oracle, of which we won 209. That is an 85% win rate.

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