Global CIO: How Will Larry Ellison Counter SAP's Mobile Offensive?Global CIO: How Will Larry Ellison Counter SAP's Mobile Offensive?

In his talk, Snabe highlighted the significance of mobility in SAP's inclusion of it among its three strategic pillars: on-premise, on-demand, and on-device. "We must now assume that businesspeople want and need access 24/7 to the processes and information they need to do their jobs," Snabe said.

"The announcement of our intention to acquire Sybase makes us #1 in business-process software, #1 in analytics, and now also #1 in mobility--and that creates some very intriguing opportunities," he said. "We believe there will be extreme demand for mobile experiences coming from everywhere."

Both executives said the combination of those mobile capabilities and the real-time technologies SAP is developing will let customers accelerate their transformative initiatives, get closer to customers, and create new growth opportunities.

So it looks like the two major battlegrounds between SAP and Oracle are shaping up to mobility, as described above, and the question of whether a homogeneous stack simplifies and accelerates enterprise IT (that's Oracle's new position), or stifles innovation by facilitating vendor lock-in, which is a point Snabe and McDermott each made on multiple occasions.

It's certainly possible that Oracle doesn't see mobile as such a vital and strategic play for the enterprise because the company has, quite simply, said next to nothing about it. Just as Ellison didn't even bring it up on the recent earnings call, Oracle president Charles Phillips also didn't raise the subject in a 45-minute interview we had a month ago.

If Oracle decides to escalate its mobile initiatives, it will certainly be through an acquisition--the question is, who's out there that could deliver a strategic advantage?

Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his page.

For more Global CIO perspectives, check out Global CIO, or write to Bob at [email protected].

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