A couple of weeks ago Oracle ran an advertisement declaring that only 4% of SAP customers upgrade to the latest version of our product, confidently citing a Gartner Group research report that looked at the subject back in March of this year.

Gartner's ombudsman blog retorts on the topic

"In an advertisement run in The Wall Street Journal on November 28, 2005, Oracle made the following claims:

"94% of customers run up-to-date Oracle Applications (Easy to upgrade at no additional cost)

4% of customers run up-to-date SAP Applications (So expensive and difficult to upgrade 96% of SAP customers didn't do it)"

The advertisement included a citation stating: "Statistics from Gartner Report March 2005"

The Gartner Report titled "ERP Upgrades Will Reflect the Uncertainties of the Overall Market" of March 2005 appears to be Oracle's source of the data quoted. The relevant data is listed below.

To compare 94% with 4%, Oracle has contrasted numbers for two different time points and aggregated all the Oracle applications shipped as Release 11i (which comprise five distinct versions, shipped over a five-year period) and compared that with one version of SAP product (which became available to customers in March 2005).

The advertisement egregiously misrepresents the data."Source: 1Prashanth RaiTag(s):Oracle, Gartner