Google’s parent company Alphabet is moving its internal financial operations from Oracle to SAP software. The news, first reported by CNBC, coincidentally comes on the same day the Supreme Court gave the final verdict in a decade-long legal battle between Oracle and Google (handing Google victory).
While the 10-year fight over Java APIs is now officially over, Google and Oracle are still competitive on other fronts. Both Google Cloud and Oracle are trying to grow their respective shares of the cloud computing market by appealing to enterprise customers — particularly those in need of hybrid and multi-cloud services, as well as those migrating on-premise workloads to the cloud.
As noted by CNBC, Oracle for years refused to certify its database software for Google Cloud, hobbling Google’s pitch to customers that wanted to host Oracle databases on the cloud. However, last year, Google Cloud launched bare metal instances for Oracle database.
“Google Cloud actively enables Oracle’s customers to run their Oracle database workloads on Google Cloud through our Bare Metal Solution,” Google Spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement to ZDNet. “But that’s entirely separate to our decision as an enterprise customer of financial software to transition our financial systems from Oracle to SAP.”
Meanwhile, Google’s move is sure to sting over at Oracle, where co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has made a very pronounced point of highlighting the number of large customers moving from SAP to Oracle cloud applications. During Oracle’s Q3 conference call, Ellison listed dozens of companies and government agencies that have moved from SAP ERP to Fusion ERP.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ZDNet.
