Global CIO: Oracle Hammered By SAP For Stifling Customer ChoiceGlobal CIO: Oracle Hammered By SAP For Stifling Customer Choice

"What matters most to us is the customer relationship," he said, "and understanding our customers' strategy and helping them figure out how we can enable that strategy to be executable. That will include innovation from SAP as well as our partners.

"No one single company has all the R&D, and all the innovation, and all the right business knowledge and strategy to make it all come together for customers," he said. "No one company has that—none."

Earlier, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka also emphasized the primacy of the customer relationship, and how an extensive global ecosystem of the world's top IT companies—including Oracle, by the way, which had a prominent booth at Sapphire—enhances that relationship and generates unique customer value.

Noting that SAP has 100 customers who've been with the company for more than 30 years, Sikka said that for his company, "the customer relationship endures because of choice—customers always prefer choice."

"For customers, it is not a landscape of one—it never is—never, ever—and the best solutions comes from the entire ecosystem, a continuously evolving, living landscape: landscapes of choice and continuity, continuing to evolve without disruption, continuously offering the best."

Sounds like unassailable logic, doesn't it? But I could also make the case that on the basis of pure logic, Phillips makes an equally compelling point about the rather obvious idea that the way to reduce IT cost and complexity is to take the steps that will, well, reduce IT cost and complexity.

"We're taking this new approach about managing because the reason you're spending so much on maintenance is because you have such a complex infrastructure to begin with and all the diversity is part of that cost," Phillips said.

"And trying to maintain all the different flavors and configurations and integrations and customizations—you've created something so complex and customized that it's unique to you—you've become a technology company because what you've created is so unique.

"But you don't want to be unique, not when it comes to your technology architecture—where you want to be unique is in your strategy and the way you configure our technology to support your strategy and not the actual technology underneath it—that's the only way you're gonna lower your cost," he said.

"So we've been preaching standardization, and now we have enough throw-weight with the stack to drive standardization. And the second thing we tell people is, we know you like having 15 suppliers for everything—but there's a cost to that. One way you can lower that maintenance cost is take the products you already own and consolidate—replace what you're using. It makes no sense, for instance, to have a license from three different companies for the same function, and you're paying your support on that. So if you're an Oracle shop—and if you're talking to us, you probably are—let's replace all that stuff. You already own the licenses—let's consolidate." (On Oracle, of course.)

Well, CIOs, if you like to have sharp and clear-cut choices, then it can't get much better than this. Both SAP and Oracle are promising you ways out of the expensive and dangerous infrastructure swamps in which you're stuck, but their roadmaps for those escapes couldn't possibly be more different.

Ready to choose? Let me know at the address below.

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