SAP Business One vs Oracle E-Business Suite, comparing both is really a contest between the leviathans of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) world. SAP has long had the largest market share of any ERP vendor. Oracle has often been close behind. Oracle and SAP are the biggest ERP vendors.

While both brands have a whole suite of ERP offerings, we will be focusing on SAP Business One vs Oracle E-Business Suite. Neither option is cheap, SAP and Oracle are not cost-leaders. We find that the cost of SAP implementations tends to be rigid, while Oracle customers are often up-sold on additional products and services. 

In the beginning…

One of the reasons why SAP has retained the largest ERP market share is their first-mover advantage. They have built their ERP offerings from the ground up and in-house. This means that their modules all integrate very well with each other, and expanding your SAP Business One software tends to be more painless than the same process with Oracle EBS.

Oracle, on the other hand, has established themselves as a firm willing to go outside their own brand. Their strategy has been to reach out and acquire other providers’ solutions in an attempt to create a best-of-breed stack within Oracle itself. This has included PeopleSoft, MICROS, and most recently NetSuite.

SAP Business One vs Oracle E-Business Suite: Deployment Options and Flexibility

Breaking down that recent NetSuite acquisition, Oracle has made it a goal to acquire a slew of SaaS providers and cloud-computing adopters. This means that the Oracle ERP Cloud is composed of several solid offerings. However, it also means that these solutions do not always interact with each other ideally. Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne can run on-premise or the cloud, so both are options depending on your needs.

SAP Business One is capable of both on-prem and cloud deployments as well. They have worked on their cloud capabilities in the last few years. SAP ERP solutions work well hosted on Amazon Web Services, which is an option we might recommend.

Implementation Differentiators between SAP Business One and Oracle

Often we find that it is often possible to fit most of your business needs into an ERP platform. There are so many modules both native and third party. This can turn the discussion into one that becomes more meta and “above the trees”.

Implementation is almost never a totally smooth process. Headaches abound. It may be wise for this to be a factor in your consideration of SAP Business One or Oracle ERP.

In Panorama Consulting’s ERP report of 2014, they found that the average SAP customer has closer to planned duration times for their implementation compared to Oracle. On average, Oracle ERP takes 22.5 months to implement while SAP is able to do that roughly 4 months more quickly.

This is likely due to SAP’s pre-configurators for specific industries, making customization and go-live time quicker. Oracle has something similar in their User Productivity Kit, but it is not as effective.

ERP Market Leader Benefits

Both Oracle and SAP are market leaders in ERP. However, SAP is the clear leader, particularly due to the first-mover advantage mentioned above.

What this means for the end-user and adopter is that there is a more active developer community. This means that there are more solutions and add-ons to enhance functionality. This extends to support as well. With a larger user-base, there will be more readily available support systems to ensure that any errors can be rectified without incurring additional costs.

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