12 ms·

Google will stop using Oracle’s finance software and adopt SAP instead

195 points by Ice_cream_suit 6y ago

Jyaif 6y ago
> Still, Ellison has boasted about its business with Google. During a 2019 meeting with analysts he said that when Google catalogs vast amounts of information, that data is “actually sitting in Oracle databases.” That's as misleading as it gets.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  It could be more misleading. He could have said "sitting in an Oracle database". And that would imply that Oracle can scale enough that one instance would handle it.
- paxys 6y ago
  Not just misleading, it is 100% false. He could easily be sued by shareholders for this.
  - lainga 6y ago
    I eagerly await Matt Levine's coverage of the story from the "everything is securities fraud" angle.
    - vmception 6y ago
      He could make more launching lawsuits about his ideas
  - zaarn 6y ago
    Any suing shareholder would be on the hostile end of an Oracle Licensing Audit.
ineedasername 6y ago
I think the usual database for SAP is Oracle. So maybe they get off of Oracle ERP, but could still be stuck with them on the back end.
- mirchiseth 6y ago
  Oracle used to be the most popular db for SAP along with SQL Server and DB2. That changed with SAP HANA. These days SAP HANA is the only supported DB for latest and greatest.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    Not knowing too much about Hana, it seems like they are doing their best to wrap in as much business intelligence as they can as opposed to having their users purchase other services, is this the case? Or do people generally maintain their BI stack after adopting Hana?
    - wdb 6y ago
      Yeah, they try to sell SAP Hana were possible :) I think they even prefer that you use SAP products in their SAP Cloud
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - toyg 6y ago
      Oracle ate a bunch of their market by going after the BI ecosystem at large and using those apps to sneak in their DB. So SAP decided they'd do the same "downstack" and eat some of the Oracle db revenue. Hence the push for HANA.
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        I know Oracle has some data mining module and decent stats functions in the database engine, but what's their end-user BI offering? Or is it just baked into their ERP offerings, so it's not branded separately?
qshaman 6y ago
Good riddance , Netsuite is awful.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  How do you know Netsuite is the product in question?
  - Rastonbury 6y ago
    Anything other than ERP would not be newsworthy. It's also less common for companies to buy SAP's non-ERP products standalone
  - qshaman 6y ago
    Oracle Cloud is awful too.
- foobaw 6y ago
  Doubt it's Netsuite. Netsuite is mostly for smaller companies.
smitop 6y ago
> CNBC has learned This isn't new information. Google has already been saying this on a (very obscure) blog months ago: https://support.google.com/corporate-suppliers/announcements/9954400 https://support.google.com/corporate-suppliers/announcements... They are changing over on May 3.
- the-rc 6y ago
  It's not even their first migration away from Oracle. I am fairly confident that Google used the horrible Oracle Calendar internally fifteen years ago (at least for travel?), until later GCal was able to replace it. And I remember another finance-related migration ten years ago or so, during the Pichette days. I thought they had gotten rid of Oracle once and for all, maybe it returned through the backdoor — an acquisition.
  - thatoneguy 6y ago
    Yeah, I started at Google in early 2006 and definitely remember using the awful Oracle Calendar product for all calendaring. I know because I set up a calendar entry in Oracle Calendar for the day in 2015 that Back to the Future takes place...only to have to create it again once we moved to Google Calendar. Re: finance, I remember using Oracle iExpense around the same time for business expenses and then at some point a couple years later we switched to another company's product. I don't think it lasted until the Pichette days, though...I'm almost certain it was replaced during Reyes' tenure as CFO and before Pichette got installed around 2008.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    that product was Steltor Calendar Time which then was purchased by Oracle. For the time, it wasn't terrible (it supported sync to palm pilot). But yes, GCal is a real improvement.
- ulfw 6y ago
  Well, that's where CNBC learned it!
Spooky23 6y ago
It makes me feel better that even at a company like Google, people are suffering with awful bullshit like Peoplesoft and SAP.
- paxys 6y ago
  The funny thing is, considering they are taking on the time & cost to move their entire system to SAP, the Oracle one they have in place today must somehow be significantly worse. Imagine that.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    Not hard to imagine if you've ever had to deal with Oracle apps. Sure, their DB was the gold standard for a long time, but their apps were always abysmal, and then of course many were cobbled together from acquisitions over the years.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      I wonder if Oracle worth was mostly an army of salesmen with one good product and loads of persistence (pun not intended). I've dabbled with 2 applicative from the 90s based on Oracle rebranded things and they were very subpar to say the least.
      - rodgerd 6y ago
        My previous experiences in dealing with Oracle as part of an RFP is that it's like something out of Mad Men, in the worst possible way: we had a bunch of requirements that they didn't want to meet, because they were trying to sell their DB appliances, they berated the RFP committee for having those requirements. They laid complaints with our management line against one staffer for asking "hostile" questions. When they didn't get the decision they wanted, they quickly escalated to exec and director level, and the exec of a major shareholder to try and get the decision overturned. It wasn't an especially pleasant experience personally, because obviously it involved a lot of very personal attacks by a vendor, but at the same time it was fascinating to watch how they networked from the top down to try to get the decision that they wanted, and run roughshod over the SMEs and process. Some years later one of the sales team sent me a "Virtualisation for Dummies" book and told me I could learn something from it.
curiousgal 6y ago
Why not build their own internal system? They'll end up hiring SAP devs anyway, why not make use of the existing talent?
- formercoder 6y ago
  I’m sure many, many PowerPoint slides were developed in order to make that decision.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  This is a great and confusing question, because of all large companies Google seems most inclined to want to own their whole software stack. Plus, they have an army of engineers who surely think finance software can't be too complicated! So what gives? How could Google end up in this position?
  - lokedhs 6y ago
    They may have tried already. It turns out that financial software is really complicated. The basic functionality is never too complicated, but most of these systems are edge cases that needs to be treated specially. Also, a lot of behaviour has legal implications, so it would take a long time to develop software to compete with something like SAP. Unless Google wants to get into the ERP software business, spending years developing such a system is a waste of money. Also, they'd need to maintain it for a very long time, and we all know what Google feels about keeping software maintained for long periods of time.
- analog31 6y ago
  Too easy for someone to use it to cook the books? Maybe it looks better in an audit if they can point to an external source for their accounting software.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > Too easy for someone to use it to cook the books? Maybe it looks better in an audit if they can point to an external source for their accounting software. I think that is probably a big concern. I read a comment once by someone who said they worked in some kind of company that did financial audits, and it said that as soon as they got a whiff of some homegrown accounting system, the audits got way more expensive, because then they'd have to do a technical audit of the system in addition to the bean counter's audit. If the company ran SAP or some other common ERP system, they didn't have to do that, because it was battle-tested and assumed to be correct.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
Google is probably the only company on earth that could spend about a year and build a vastly superior product to both Oracle and SAP that everybody would want. So why don't they? My guesses: 1. It's boring. 2. Those are marketing-driven products and Google is engineering-driven. 3. ???
- cutemonster 6y ago
  I think a year is a huge underestimate. And why not? Because if they spend the time elsewhere they'll make more money. Opportunity cost
- abraae 6y ago
  > Google [ ...] could spend about a year and build a vastly superior product to both Oracle and SAP that everybody would want. So why don't they? This is laughable to anyone who has ever worked on development of an ERP product. Here's a thought experiment. Let's take one part - one part only - of the whole ERP / enterprise software spectrum. Let's pick HR for an example. Now let's pick one part - only one part - of the whole HR product spectrum. Let's pick recruitment. How about of Google did what you say, but just in this tiny space? How much overkill would that be? It turns out, Google did launch a product in this space. It was called Google Hire. By your measure, Google should have smashed the life out of this little part of the bigger enterprise software space. Instead, they shut down within 2 years in a burst of failure.
  - jchonphoenix 6y ago
    I agree they won't do it, but it isn't laughable. I've worked at another FANG and have used a lot of the recruitment software you reference. That FANG rebuilt the software from the ground up internally and have successfully made their process much more effective to the point of it being a competitive advantage. There's a tradeoff with building software internally and I agree is almost always isn't worth it. But the advantage is that the software has only 1 customer: yourself. That allows a level of product market fit that just isn't achievable with off the shelf software.
i5h4n 6y ago
Can anyone shed light on which specific "finance software" of Oracle is being migrated off from here?
- antonvs 6y ago
  It would be some of the products listed here: https://www.oracle.com/erp/financials-cloud/ https://www.oracle.com/erp/financials-cloud/ If you're a big enterprise like Google, managing your financials is super-non-trivial. Solutions like Oracle or SAP are pretty much the only options.
sradman 6y ago
If I remember correctly, Eric Schmidt said that one of the first things he did as CEO of Google was to move the company off of Quickbooks and onto Oracle ERP. SAP HANA is certified for AWS, Azure, and GCP and all three are trying to win SAP customers as they transition their OnPrem systems to the cloud. Oracle has long had an antagonistic relationship with its partners; I suspect this move is a strategic alignment with SAP as a key Google partner. The enemy of my enemy... probably plays a part too.
- ksec 6y ago
  >Google was to move the company off of Quickbooks and onto Oracle ERP. Why? Is not like Quickbook is so small tiny startup.( Did a Google Search and couldn't find anything )
Aeolun 6y ago
> in the next few weeks > oracle to SAP How?!
- elygre 6y ago
  By starting a long time ago.
gigatexal 6y ago
Honestly I’m surprised they haven’t built something in-house. Actually, I’m not: accounting and payroll software isn’t core to what they do so best to buy it.
eurasiantiger 6y ago
Ffs I hate the Internet nowadays. It’s all cookie notices that make you sign your soul away.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Do you actually hate cookie notices that inform you you're signing your soul away? Or did you just not know you should hate the internet before the notices became required?
  - ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
    I know what a cookie is and never really cared. Seems like a fair trade for a wealth of entertainment and knowledge that 30 years ago would cost considerable amounts to obtain. An ad for board games because I Googled board games doesn't make me feel like I sold my soul to the devil, like some seem to believe. I hate the cookie pop-ups with a passion, its done nothing but discourage visiting new sites, which is awful for the internet. It pushes you to use sites you already know of (which are generally quite big).
    - chy3dz 6y ago
      https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_14_Annoyances/filter.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistr...
  - eurasiantiger 6y ago
    Before, I was not aware that by reading one tech news article, ALL of my historical personal data across all of my devices would get processed by literally hundreds of different faceless corporate entities.
okareaman 6y ago
Is this significant in some way? I'm having a hard time understanding the significance.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  If only in the light of recent court decision on Java API. :)
luckystarr 6y ago
Google is obviously big enough to survive a SAP introduction. :-P
sunstone 6y ago
That should be cheap and easy.
sn_master 6y ago
Amazon successfully did it in 2019 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-... Interestingly, Oracle gave Amazon 97.5% discount on the Java license so Amazon would use Java on Kindle instead of Android https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/19/oracle-gave-amazon-a-discount-on-java-to-keep-android-off-the-paperwhite-wait-what/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/19/oracle-gave-amazon...

> Still, Ellison has boasted about its business with Google. During a 2019 meeting with analysts he said that when Google catalogs vast amounts of information, that data is “actually sitting in Oracle databases.” That's as misleading as it gets.

adrianmonk 6y ago
It could be more misleading. He could have said "sitting in an Oracle database". And that would imply that Oracle can scale enough that one instance would handle it.
paxys 6y ago
Not just misleading, it is 100% false. He could easily be sued by shareholders for this.
- lainga 6y ago
  I eagerly await Matt Levine's coverage of the story from the "everything is securities fraud" angle.
  - vmception 6y ago
    He could make more launching lawsuits about his ideas
- zaarn 6y ago
  Any suing shareholder would be on the hostile end of an Oracle Licensing Audit.

ineedasername 6y ago

I think the usual database for SAP is Oracle. So maybe they get off of Oracle ERP, but could still be stuck with them on the back end.

mirchiseth 6y ago
Oracle used to be the most popular db for SAP along with SQL Server and DB2. That changed with SAP HANA. These days SAP HANA is the only supported DB for latest and greatest.
- Guest42 6y ago
  Not knowing too much about Hana, it seems like they are doing their best to wrap in as much business intelligence as they can as opposed to having their users purchase other services, is this the case? Or do people generally maintain their BI stack after adopting Hana?
  - wdb 6y ago
    Yeah, they try to sell SAP Hana were possible :) I think they even prefer that you use SAP products in their SAP Cloud
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - toyg 6y ago
    Oracle ate a bunch of their market by going after the BI ecosystem at large and using those apps to sneak in their DB. So SAP decided they'd do the same "downstack" and eat some of the Oracle db revenue. Hence the push for HANA.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I know Oracle has some data mining module and decent stats functions in the database engine, but what's their end-user BI offering? Or is it just baked into their ERP offerings, so it's not branded separately?

qshaman 6y ago

Good riddance , Netsuite is awful.

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
How do you know Netsuite is the product in question?
- Rastonbury 6y ago
  Anything other than ERP would not be newsworthy. It's also less common for companies to buy SAP's non-ERP products standalone
- qshaman 6y ago
  Oracle Cloud is awful too.
foobaw 6y ago
Doubt it's Netsuite. Netsuite is mostly for smaller companies.

smitop 6y ago

> CNBC has learned This isn't new information. Google has already been saying this on a (very obscure) blog months ago: https://support.google.com/corporate-suppliers/announcements/9954400 https://support.google.com/corporate-suppliers/announcements... They are changing over on May 3.

the-rc 6y ago
It's not even their first migration away from Oracle. I am fairly confident that Google used the horrible Oracle Calendar internally fifteen years ago (at least for travel?), until later GCal was able to replace it. And I remember another finance-related migration ten years ago or so, during the Pichette days. I thought they had gotten rid of Oracle once and for all, maybe it returned through the backdoor — an acquisition.
- thatoneguy 6y ago
  Yeah, I started at Google in early 2006 and definitely remember using the awful Oracle Calendar product for all calendaring. I know because I set up a calendar entry in Oracle Calendar for the day in 2015 that Back to the Future takes place...only to have to create it again once we moved to Google Calendar. Re: finance, I remember using Oracle iExpense around the same time for business expenses and then at some point a couple years later we switched to another company's product. I don't think it lasted until the Pichette days, though...I'm almost certain it was replaced during Reyes' tenure as CFO and before Pichette got installed around 2008.
- dekhn 6y ago
  that product was Steltor Calendar Time which then was purchased by Oracle. For the time, it wasn't terrible (it supported sync to palm pilot). But yes, GCal is a real improvement.
ulfw 6y ago
Well, that's where CNBC learned it!

Spooky23 6y ago

It makes me feel better that even at a company like Google, people are suffering with awful bullshit like Peoplesoft and SAP.

paxys 6y ago
The funny thing is, considering they are taking on the time & cost to move their entire system to SAP, the Oracle one they have in place today must somehow be significantly worse. Imagine that.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Not hard to imagine if you've ever had to deal with Oracle apps. Sure, their DB was the gold standard for a long time, but their apps were always abysmal, and then of course many were cobbled together from acquisitions over the years.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I wonder if Oracle worth was mostly an army of salesmen with one good product and loads of persistence (pun not intended). I've dabbled with 2 applicative from the 90s based on Oracle rebranded things and they were very subpar to say the least.
    - rodgerd 6y ago
      My previous experiences in dealing with Oracle as part of an RFP is that it's like something out of Mad Men, in the worst possible way: we had a bunch of requirements that they didn't want to meet, because they were trying to sell their DB appliances, they berated the RFP committee for having those requirements. They laid complaints with our management line against one staffer for asking "hostile" questions. When they didn't get the decision they wanted, they quickly escalated to exec and director level, and the exec of a major shareholder to try and get the decision overturned. It wasn't an especially pleasant experience personally, because obviously it involved a lot of very personal attacks by a vendor, but at the same time it was fascinating to watch how they networked from the top down to try to get the decision that they wanted, and run roughshod over the SMEs and process. Some years later one of the sales team sent me a "Virtualisation for Dummies" book and told me I could learn something from it.

curiousgal 6y ago

Why not build their own internal system? They'll end up hiring SAP devs anyway, why not make use of the existing talent?

formercoder 6y ago
I’m sure many, many PowerPoint slides were developed in order to make that decision.
etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
This is a great and confusing question, because of all large companies Google seems most inclined to want to own their whole software stack. Plus, they have an army of engineers who surely think finance software can't be too complicated! So what gives? How could Google end up in this position?
- lokedhs 6y ago
  They may have tried already. It turns out that financial software is really complicated. The basic functionality is never too complicated, but most of these systems are edge cases that needs to be treated specially. Also, a lot of behaviour has legal implications, so it would take a long time to develop software to compete with something like SAP. Unless Google wants to get into the ERP software business, spending years developing such a system is a waste of money. Also, they'd need to maintain it for a very long time, and we all know what Google feels about keeping software maintained for long periods of time.
analog31 6y ago
Too easy for someone to use it to cook the books? Maybe it looks better in an audit if they can point to an external source for their accounting software.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > Too easy for someone to use it to cook the books? Maybe it looks better in an audit if they can point to an external source for their accounting software. I think that is probably a big concern. I read a comment once by someone who said they worked in some kind of company that did financial audits, and it said that as soon as they got a whiff of some homegrown accounting system, the audits got way more expensive, because then they'd have to do a technical audit of the system in addition to the bean counter's audit. If the company ran SAP or some other common ERP system, they didn't have to do that, because it was battle-tested and assumed to be correct.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

Google is probably the only company on earth that could spend about a year and build a vastly superior product to both Oracle and SAP that everybody would want. So why don't they? My guesses: 1. It's boring. 2. Those are marketing-driven products and Google is engineering-driven. 3. ???

cutemonster 6y ago
I think a year is a huge underestimate. And why not? Because if they spend the time elsewhere they'll make more money. Opportunity cost
abraae 6y ago
> Google [ ...] could spend about a year and build a vastly superior product to both Oracle and SAP that everybody would want. So why don't they? This is laughable to anyone who has ever worked on development of an ERP product. Here's a thought experiment. Let's take one part - one part only - of the whole ERP / enterprise software spectrum. Let's pick HR for an example. Now let's pick one part - only one part - of the whole HR product spectrum. Let's pick recruitment. How about of Google did what you say, but just in this tiny space? How much overkill would that be? It turns out, Google did launch a product in this space. It was called Google Hire. By your measure, Google should have smashed the life out of this little part of the bigger enterprise software space. Instead, they shut down within 2 years in a burst of failure.
- jchonphoenix 6y ago
  I agree they won't do it, but it isn't laughable. I've worked at another FANG and have used a lot of the recruitment software you reference. That FANG rebuilt the software from the ground up internally and have successfully made their process much more effective to the point of it being a competitive advantage. There's a tradeoff with building software internally and I agree is almost always isn't worth it. But the advantage is that the software has only 1 customer: yourself. That allows a level of product market fit that just isn't achievable with off the shelf software.

i5h4n 6y ago

Can anyone shed light on which specific "finance software" of Oracle is being migrated off from here?

antonvs 6y ago
It would be some of the products listed here: https://www.oracle.com/erp/financials-cloud/ https://www.oracle.com/erp/financials-cloud/ If you're a big enterprise like Google, managing your financials is super-non-trivial. Solutions like Oracle or SAP are pretty much the only options.

sradman 6y ago

If I remember correctly, Eric Schmidt said that one of the first things he did as CEO of Google was to move the company off of Quickbooks and onto Oracle ERP. SAP HANA is certified for AWS, Azure, and GCP and all three are trying to win SAP customers as they transition their OnPrem systems to the cloud. Oracle has long had an antagonistic relationship with its partners; I suspect this move is a strategic alignment with SAP as a key Google partner. The enemy of my enemy... probably plays a part too.

ksec 6y ago
>Google was to move the company off of Quickbooks and onto Oracle ERP. Why? Is not like Quickbook is so small tiny startup.( Did a Google Search and couldn't find anything )

Aeolun 6y ago

> in the next few weeks > oracle to SAP How?!

elygre 6y ago
By starting a long time ago.

gigatexal 6y ago

Honestly I’m surprised they haven’t built something in-house. Actually, I’m not: accounting and payroll software isn’t core to what they do so best to buy it.

eurasiantiger 6y ago

Ffs I hate the Internet nowadays. It’s all cookie notices that make you sign your soul away.

viraptor 6y ago
Do you actually hate cookie notices that inform you you're signing your soul away? Or did you just not know you should hate the internet before the notices became required?
- ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
  I know what a cookie is and never really cared. Seems like a fair trade for a wealth of entertainment and knowledge that 30 years ago would cost considerable amounts to obtain. An ad for board games because I Googled board games doesn't make me feel like I sold my soul to the devil, like some seem to believe. I hate the cookie pop-ups with a passion, its done nothing but discourage visiting new sites, which is awful for the internet. It pushes you to use sites you already know of (which are generally quite big).
  - chy3dz 6y ago
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistry/master/filters/filter_14_Annoyances/filter.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistr...
- eurasiantiger 6y ago
  Before, I was not aware that by reading one tech news article, ALL of my historical personal data across all of my devices would get processed by literally hundreds of different faceless corporate entities.

okareaman 6y ago

Is this significant in some way? I'm having a hard time understanding the significance.

ComodoHacker 6y ago
If only in the light of recent court decision on Java API. :)

luckystarr 6y ago

Google is obviously big enough to survive a SAP introduction. :-P

sunstone 6y ago

That should be cheap and easy.

sn_master 6y ago

Amazon successfully did it in 2019 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-... Interestingly, Oracle gave Amazon 97.5% discount on the Java license so Amazon would use Java on Kindle instead of Android https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/19/oracle-gave-amazon-a-discount-on-java-to-keep-android-off-the-paperwhite-wait-what/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/19/oracle-gave-amazon...