I am about to start of my career in an ERP Consultancy environment. I have the option of working in a SAP or Oracle team. Could anyone offer some adivce as regards what they see as being main the differences between the two in terms of industry focus, clients, project lenght, project budgets, future direction etc. Thanks .....

Judging from the demands I am receiving from my business in terms of desired experience, SAP is currently in more demand - but who knows what the future holds...

Thank you for that. Does anyone else have anything to add. It would be much appreciated ...

I agree, in Europe, at the moment, SAP is the market leader. Very few companies in the IT market are as aggressive as Oracle though. They've bought PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards with it) and you see what happened with the Retek takeover... They also are in many large companies with the database platform anyway.

International transformation programmes will often have an ERP element, and SAP is the defacto international ERP choice, which accounts for about 80% of the marketplace. As Recruitgal says, who knows what the future has in store. Oracle is currently making very agressive moves (recent acquisitions, especially peoplesoft; jdedwards; retek etc) which will start moving it into more direct competition with SAP's core market. Essentially, SAP allows organisations to determine where their money is spent and thus allows the foundations of their strategies to be formed. Oracle meanwhile focuses more on data management. But the two giants, as they strive to increase already vast revenues and profits are on a collision course where their offerings will continue to overlap more and more. My personal bet is on Oracle, despite the fact the SAP is the unofficial leader, mainly due to Larry Ellison (Oracles CEO). This guy is a legend.

Yes, I agree, Larry has got a vision and he is consolidating the intellectual capital very smartly. He is preparing to open more choices to the customers with reduced cost of ownership. Definetely, Oracle has a future.