Oracle is snatching ERP customers from rivals, channel VP claims

Javier Torres says three-pronged attack is winning over ERP clients

Oracle is seeing its enterprise resource planning (ERP) offerings lure customers away from its competitors, according to Javier Torres, VP of EMEA channels.

In its second-quarter results, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison declared that the vendor would be expanding its leadership in the market.

Speaking to CRN at the vendor's OpenWorld event in London, Torres set out Oracle's three-pronged strategy to expand in the ERP space.

"We have a big focus on migrating our own customers to the cloud," he explained.

"We also have a good number of net new customers from different segments of the market.

"Thirdly, we are starting to see cases where we are taking customers from competition. I would say we are focusing on those three areas to continue expanding our ERP."

The channel boss said that although the number of customers moving to the vendor from its competitors is still relatively small, he foresees it growing despite the lengthy process moving to ERP can entail for clients.

"In the last year, our focus has been to position how ERP operates. We are making it simpler for customers to move to the install base with an ERP cloud," he said.

"As we start to gain momentum - we have 6,000 customers globally - we see the opportunity to take away customers from [our] competition."

He also emphasised how Oracle is capturing the ERP market for both the enterprise and SMB spaces through its own-brand Fusion ERP and NetSuite (which it acquired for $9.3bn in 2016) offerings.

"If you look at the partner quadrant, the number one solution is Fusion ERP, and the number three solution is NetSuite, which is a very specific solution for the mid-market," he explained.

"We are combining a high-end car with a utility car, so we have the best of both models on the market."

Torres said partner feedback for ERP has been enthusiastic, and that it is usually the first topic that they want to talk about when he meets with them.

The message partners should take away from the vendor's two-day event is that now is the time to act to capture the cloud opportunity, according to Torres.

"[Partners] have to continue investing and developing their enablement and solutions that will bring customers faster to the cloud," he said.

"The time is now, the market is really deep in cloud and customers are talking about this. Even if it is something that will happen in two to three years, they have to act now."

This message was certainly taken on board by some event attendees.

John Nicol, HR systems strategy manager at Sky, attended the event in the hope of learning more about the vendor's cloud-based applications.

However, he had not anticipated the speed at which the switch to cloud is happening.

"The move to the cloud is more advanced than I had expected, in terms of the application side of things," he told CRN at the OpenWorld event.

"Most of my interests are around HR systems. At the moment, we are using a heavily customised system, but I think the future really is on the more configurable side of things rather than customisable.

"I'd always known there was a movement in the direction of cloud, but I hadn't realised how far it had moved in the last 18 months.

"That's a very big positive step for us. We've recently been acquired by Comcast as a global company and so we are looking to make more moves in terms of technology."