Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is shifting its internal financial operations from Oracle software to SAP. The news, first reported by CNBC, coincidentally came on the same day that the Supreme Court rendered its final verdict in a decade-long legal battle between Oracle and Google (giving Google victory).
Although the 10-year struggle for Java APIs has now officially ended, Google and Oracle are still competitive on other fronts. Both Google Cloud and Oracle are trying to increase their respective shares in the cloud computing market, attracting corporate customers – especially those who need hybrid and multi-cloud services, as well as those who migrate local workloads to the cloud.
As noted by CNBC, Oracle for years refused to certify its database software for Google Cloud, disrupting Google’s speech to customers who wanted to host Oracle databases in the cloud. However, last year, Google Cloud launched bare metal instances for the Oracle database.
“Google Cloud allows Oracle customers to run their Oracle database workloads on Google Cloud through our Bare Metal solution,” said Google spokesman José Castañeda in a statement to ZDNet. “But this is totally different from our decision as an enterprise financial software customer to transition our financial systems from Oracle to SAP.”
In the meantime, Google’s move will certainly affect Oracle, where co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison made a point of highlighting the number of large customers moving from SAP to Oracle cloud applications. During Oracle’s third-quarter conference call, Ellison listed dozens of companies and government agencies that switched from SAP ERP to Fusion ERP.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ZDNet.