Sports firm reveals reasons for selecting SAP over Oracle

by Andrew James

Following the recent $350 million a year deal signed between Sport Chalet to SAP, Howard Kaminsky, CFO of Sport Chalet has announced that one of the biggest reasons that they chose the mySAP ERP software package over Oracles was due to a lack of integration between Oracle financial applications and the retail apps of Retek, which it has been using for the past 18 months.

Kaminsky also commented that SAP's offering for the retail market, by comparison, "was ahead of its time in that a lot of pieces were integrated". “Oracle was a close runner up”, he says, but Sport Chalet was concerned that an employee in one department would see a different screen than an another employee in a different department, even if the data was the same. "It wasn't like Oracle couldn't do everything; it just felt like SAP had an edge," he says.

Such comments made by potential customers may start alarm bells ringing for Oracle, who face a huge task to integrate all of their recent acquisitions and this is perhaps the biggest question hanging over its success in ERP.

With the Sport Chalet deal, SAP can also be buoyed by winning the businesses from a medium sized enterprise, which is a key factor in SAP AGs plans to grow from 35 000 to 100 000 customers by 2010. "We went out and looked at all the usual software companies that relate to retail," Kaminsky says. "At the time we didn't expect SAP to be in the running; we didn't know they were that interested in the middle market. They came back very aggressively and said they were very interested."