Comparative analysis of ERP vendors: SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft

Transcription

1 K507 Enterprise Resource Planning 2008 Fall ERP Project Comparative analysis of ERP vendors: SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Koenraad Adams, Eric Piazzoni, and In-Saeng Suh Abstract This is a study of the comparative analysis on the enterprise resources planning (ERP) vendors, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. We research on functionalities, cost, features, and target market for each vendor. Keywords: ERP, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, SME 1

2 1. Introduction ERP system is an integrated information system to support the business within different organizational parts of an enterprise. The leading global providers are SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. ERP packages are designed to be customizable to concrete needs of an organization and to its legacy systems. The customization of ERP modules for a concrete user is performed with special tools and using specific or standard programming languages. Due to already mentioned general ERP characteristics, customization and implementation usually require specialized knowledge and significant resources. SAP was founded on April 1, 1972, by five IBM employees. It developed its first product (financial accounting software) in close cooperation with its first customer. The company grew initially around ERP and solidified its market leadership by being a pioneer in the move from mainframe to client-server computing with its R/3 ERP solution introduced in the 1990s. From there, SAP expanded into a much broader set of applications for other functions in the enterprise: customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product life-cycle management (PLM), and supplier relationship management (SRM). By bundling and integrating these applications, SAP became known for high-quality, comprehensive enterprise solutions, which SAP or SAP-trained SI consultants would then customize. Oracle was founded in 1977 as Software Development Laboratories. The first Oracle program was written in assembly language, ran on PDP-11 and with 128k of memory. The software was never "officially" released though. Version 2 which was released in 1979 was the first to be released. The company had changed its name by then to Relational Software Inc. Business grew and by 1982 they had changed their name again, this time to Oracle and in 1987 the company went public. Today, Oracle remains one of the leaders in the ERP industry. A few of the firsts Oracle brought us are: The first commercially-available SQL-based database (1979) 2

3 The first database to support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) (1983) The first distributed database (1986) The first database product tested to comply with the ANSI SQL standard (1993) The first 64-bit database (1995) The first web database (1997) The first proprietary RDBMS to become available on Linux (1998) The first database to support XML (1999) Microsoft Dynamics AX is a line of business management solutions that provides financial management, business intelligence, human resource management, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), manufacturing, supply chain management solutions, collaborative workspace, and configuration and development. The Information Technology views quadrants Gartner Consulting produces each year as a type of benchmark to see where each provider stacks up against their competition. In 2007, Gartner released the quadrant on the left. While many will argue that Gartner s methods are too simplistic and don t give a truly accurate view of what the decision makers face, it is still a good place to start when comparing products. Gartner ranks venders in two areas, Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Using various qualifiers based on the rankings, the solutions are places in one of four quadrants: Leaders score higher on both criteria; the ability to execute and completeness of vision. Typically larger industry developed businesses with vision and potential for expansion 3

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