What is the future of SAP in large organizations?
Over the next few years, most ERP users will begin to move beyond application-by-application deployment of SAP ERP 6.0 solutions to large-scale migrations of core enterprise systems. If experience is any guide, the lifecycle of these systems will be from 10 to 15 years. The next round of decisions about SAP deployment will be among the most important that today’s executives will ever make.
What options are available?
For most organizations, migration to another vendor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems would be neither realistic nor desirable. The choice of a core database platform is, however, an open option. For many users, it will be – at least from a technological perspective – the most important variable of future SAP evolution in their organizations over which they have control.
- It will come as no surprise that DB2 9 costs less than Oracle 10g.
- There are significant differences in license costs for the two platforms as a percentage of SAP Application Value (SAV).
- If allowance is made for DB2 9 performance, compression and automation capabilities, a broader set of differences emerge.
- Cost reductions occur not only in database software, but also in database servers, disk and tape storage systems, and database- and storage-related administrative processes. These savings more than offset costs of large-scale migration from Oracle to DB2 9.
