How Oracle ousted SAP as a top ERP provider

Oracle has just unlocked new bragging rights after seemingly taking the crown as the leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider in the industry, ousting SAP from its longtime top spot.

According to recent data from technology market-research company Apps Run the World (ARTW), Oracle’s ERP business brought in $8.77 billion in revenue in 2024 and accounted for 6.63% of the ERP industry market share. Just a hair behind was SAP, which brought in $8.68 billion in revenue for the year with a market share of 6.57%. The market-research company calculates revenue by considering the following revenue types: licenses, support and maintenance, and software-as-a-service.

Gathering steam. Albert Pang, president of ARTW, told IT Brew that Oracle’s growth in the ERP space has been primarily driven by its 2016 acquisition of NetSuite and the strength of its Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP offering.

“These two are currently the twin pillars for the cloud ERP solutions from Oracle,” Pang said.

On the other hand, SAP’s ability to migrate consumers from its legacy environment to the cloud has remained a “work in progress” over the years, Pang said, adding that this has ultimately had an “adverse impact” on the amount of revenue the software company receives from customers on a regular basis.

“In that respect, that also plays a part on how SAP has perhaps failed to monetize a lot of the customers at the maximum impact level,” he said.

Keeping the ball rolling. Holger Mueller, VP and principal analyst at research and advisory firm Constellation Research, said Oracle needs to continue innovating its services to maintain its lead, especially as enterprise software customers begin to look to ERP providers to enable processes with AI. He said Oracle’s in-house cloud platform gives the company an edge against SAP and its multicloud applications.

“They’re basically one year behind in building AI applications compared to Oracle because of just the deployment options,” he said.

However, Pang told IT Brew that the next five years will be filled with a lot of “migration exercise” from enterprises, meaning the “game is on” for ERP providers.

“I would certainly not dismiss anybody from becoming…number one down the road,” Pang said. “But, I think at this point, Oracle has a slight advantage.”