Raw Transcript: SAP S/4HANA vs Oracle Cloud vs Microsoft D365 | Picking the Wrong ERP Could Cost You Millions

SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are the three leading ERP vendors in the market space. But which one is best? That's what I want to talk about here today. My name is Eric Kimberling. I'm the CEO of Third Stage Consulting. We're an independent tech agnostic consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world with their digital transformation journeys. and SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are three systems that we commonly help clients evaluate and implement. And by the way, our company, Third Stage, is not affiliated with any of these three vendors. And it's been a few years since I provided my last update or my last comparison video of SAPS4ANA, Oracle Cloud ERP, and Microsoft D365. So, what I want to do today is talk about these three systems, how they compare to one another, especially in the context of today's cloud and AI environment. So, I'm really going to hone in on those two things, cloud and AI, which ones have the biggest strengths and which ones have the biggest weaknesses. And ultimately, my goal here today is to give you enough of a comparison to where you can hone in on the one or the ones that you think are most relevant for your organization. Let's start with a brief comparison of these three systems. First of all, there's SAP. Now, SAP's flagship product is S4 HANA. It's also recently been referred to as Cloud ERP. They've rebranded the system, although a lot of us still call it S4 HANA. And there's three different flavors of S4 HANA. You have S4 HANA on premise, you have S4 HANA private cloud, and you have S4 HANA public cloud. Now, most clients we work with are moving towards private cloud. It's sort of a hybrid option to where you're getting some of the flexibility of onrem, but you're not necessarily limited to the public cloud limitations in terms of how the software can be customized. So most of our clients and most of our companies we work with are moving towards private cloud but you do have three different options. There's also Oracle Cloud ERP. Now Oracle Cloud ERP used to be called Oracle Fusion and it's something that's been in development for a long time and it's part of that Oracle suite of products. And then finally there's Microsoft Dynamics 365 which is their new flagship product after sunsetting great planes Nision and Exapa. Those are the three legacy products where D365 is designed to replace them. Now, I'm going to dive into the pros and cons of each of these systems in this video. But in addition to this comparison, I also encourage you to read our 2026 digital transformation report. That report is independent tech agnostic just like this video is. And it's meant to give you an overview of some of the different software options in the marketplace, some of the trends we're seeing, and independent software rankings of different solutions in the marketplace. You can find that by scanning the QR code right here or you can go to the links below. When comparing these three products, let's start with cloud maturity. All three vendors are promising a vision of a full cloud solution, but they differ pretty significantly in terms of their cloud maturity. Let's start with Oracle Cloud ERP because of the three, Oracle is probably the most native cloud solution in terms of it being written for the cloud. If you remember back years ago, Oracle had been working on Oracle Fusion for years. And it was going on for so long that this cloud solution that they were developing ultimately led to some people calling it Oracle Confusion because it was just taking so long for them to develop it. Fast forward to 2025 or the mid2020s and Oracle Fusion has evolved into Oracle Cloud ERP. But the good news for Oracle is that they spent a lot of time and money building this platform in the cloud, which is different from SAP and Microsoft who largely lifted and shifted their on-prem solutions and rewrote it in a cloud architecture. And what this means for customers is that if you're an Oracle customer, you're going to get more automatic upgrades. So, you're constantly going to be on the most recent version of the software, whereas with SAP and Microsoft, it's not quite that cut and dry. Now let's look at SAP S4 HANA or SAP cloud ERP. I mentioned at the beginning of this video that most of our clients are moving towards a private cloud SAP solution. And the reason this is important is because that's where most customers are in the cloud journey. They haven't yet made the jump to public cloud largely because the public cloud solution from SAP is not nearly as developed and mature in many cases as private cloud or certainly the old onremise version of S4 HANA. And even more so that's even more true for ECC. ECC had been around for so long that there's a lot of innovation, a lot of R&D that went into that product. Now SAPS4 HANA is giving you a lot of new capabilities in terms of AI and I'm going to come back to that point here in a moment. But there's a lot of depth that is missing in SAP cloud that existed in ECC especially when you get into some of the advanced planning, advanced manufacturing, advanced warehousing, some of the other aspects that more complex manufacturing supply chain organizations might need. And SAP relies heavily in hyperscalers for their cloud solutions. So on one hand it's a good thing because you have the option of choosing different hyperscalers to host your SAP instance but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself is that really a true cloud solution in the way that Oracle provides it or is it simply on premise and it's just being hosted on the cloud by someone else. That's a question that's up for discussion and debate. And finally there's Microsoft Dynamics 365. Now, Microsoft D365 is built on the Azure platform, which has its own complexities, especially if you're not a Microsoft shop or you don't have those specialized Azure skill sets. It can be considered somewhat of a fragmented hypers scale environment that can be difficult for some to manage. So, while it is a true cloud solution, Dynamics 365, some question and some struggle with the Azure environment. So, if you're looking for the true most innovative cloud solution, I would say Oracle probably leads the pack here. But, as we'll talk about in the rest of this video, cloud is just one aspect of how we should be comparing these three different systems. All three of these vendors, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, are heavily touting their AI capabilities. In fact, most enterprise tech providers are doing that. But SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are really leading the charge on this AI arms race. So the question becomes, which of these systems wins out in the realm of artificial intelligence? Well, let's start with SAP. SAP has Juul, which is their AI co-pilot, not C-pilot in the way that Microsoft brands their AI co-pilot, but they consider it a co-pilot for SAP customers using S4HANA. Now I would say SAP holds an advantage here when it comes to using AI in supply chain intensive and/or manufacturing intensive environments. SAP is very strong when it comes to manufacturing and supply chain management. Although I will say as I mentioned before there are some capabilities that haven't quite matured in S4 HANA in the same way they had matured in ECC. But when you compare S4 HANA to Oracle cloud and Microsoft D365, SAP in my opinion is the clear winner when it comes to not only AI capabilities in manufacturing and supply chain but just overall capabilities in manufacturing and supply chain. The caveat here though is that it is a complex product. Juul is complex. S4 HANA is complex. The SAP ecosystem is complex with Aribba and success factors and Concur and all these different systems that bolt on to the core S4 HANA. But if you're a large complex organization, that may be the most suitable option for you. Now, let's look at Oracle. Oracle's AI capabilities are the strongest in finance and financial reporting and accounting. So, if you're a finance-driven organization or if you consider your digital transformation more of a financial transformation focused on the back office finances, then Oracle might actually be the best fit. Oracle has historically been the strongest of the three in finance-driven organizations and within the finance function in general. And the same is true for their AI capabilities as well. They've really gone deep into creating AI capabilities to help speed up the period end close, to help automate financial reporting, and to create a lot of flexibility around how organizations run their financial reports and run their financial dashboards. Now, let's move to Microsoft D365. Microsoft D365 has C-Pilot, which many of you may use. Even if you're not using D365, if you're using Microsoft Office, you may be familiar with Microsoft Copilot. and copilot is embedded into Dynamics 365 as well. Now, Microsoft D365, I would say, is going to win out compared to SAP and Oracle when it comes to AI and overall capability at the end user level. So, if you look at frontline people that are keying information into a system, tracking information, making day-to-day decisions, and really running the operations of your business, Microsoft has an advantage here because it's got that Microsoft familiarity. A lot of employees are already familiar with Copilot. they might be using it in their personal lives. So it makes it a little bit easier to use it in their business setting as well. And so that Microsoft cool factor and the knowledge and familiarity that many employees have with Microsoft can give it an advantage from an enduser adoption perspective. However, the problem with Microsoft E365 is that it doesn't have the scale and it can't handle the complexity of a lot of larger, more complex organizations in the same way SAP can within manufacturing supply chain or in the same way that Oracle can within more complex finance and accounting organizations. So if one of your key criteria is flexibility and you want to maximize or optimize end user adoption, Microsoft probably has a slight advantage over the other two when it comes to AI as well as general enduser workflows and capabilities. Now this leads to hidden risks. We have to look at the risk profile not just the advantages of each of these systems. And each of these systems and each of these vendors has their own inherent risks that are important to be aware of. Starting with SAP and S4 HANA, you have what I mentioned before which is a very complex product which can be very complex to implement. You add to the fact that most of the SAP partners are larger consulting firms that imposes or introduces a certain amount of risk to you as an organization as well particularly as it relates to maintaining a budget and maintaining control over the overall implementation. Having said that though, SAP of the three probably has the strongest and the most robust ecosystem of potential implementation partners. Although I will say that despite the viability of S4 HANA in the fact that so many ECC customers have yet to make the transition to S4 HANA, that means there's a lot of future revenue and a future demand for SAP services. That may also mean that it's going to be a shortage of SAP resources. And we're already starting to see that in the industry right now where there's so many people rushing to move to their S4 HANA upgrade that it's hard to find the really good qualified technical resources that can support it. So those are some things to be aware of as it relates to SAP. Moving on to Oracle Cloud, Oracle is a well-known, wellestablished vendor, but they don't have the same ecosystem, the same broad ecosystem that SAP does. They're getting better. It's growing. They have a lot of large system integrators that they've started to introduce and it's getting better every day. But when you compare Oracle to SAP, SAP has a more robust and a more global consultant base that can support technical implementations. Which leads us to Microsoft Dynamics 365. Microsoft probably has the most implementation partners of the three. But the problem is is there's a lot of really bad ones in there. It's a very mixed bag of implementation partners. There's not a lot of controls over who can qualify as an implementation partner. Just about anyone can hang up a shingle and consider themselves a Microsoft technical implementation partner. Whereas it's a little bit more stringent and there's a tighter qualification process for Oracle and SAP partners, which is why choosing a partner in general is so important, but especially in the world of Microsoft E365. So this begs the question, who wins? Which of these three solutions is the best for the 2020s and beyond? Let's dive into each of these one by one. If you're a large global complex organization, especially if you're in manufacturing or you've got a complex supply chain, SAP may be the best fit for you. Especially if you're already a legacy SAP customer that's using ECC or even R3, SAPS4 is probably going to be the best option for you when you consider all the pros and cons and comparing these three systems to one another. The key here though with SAP is that you need to be tolerant of risk and you need to have very tight governance and controls in place to ensure that the project doesn't spiral out of control and lead to a money pit that doesn't deliver business value. But despite that risk, assuming you can manage that risk, SAP may be the best fit for you. If you're looking at this project as more of a financial transformation and you want to standardize your finance and your accounting operations, Oracle is probably the winner here because they typically and historically are stronger in the world of accounting and finance, especially when you look at some of the AI capabilities that they have and the overall workflows within the system, then Oracle can be a very strong contender there. And if end-user adoption and overall flexibility and open integration is most important to you, then Microsoft Dynamics 365 is probably your best bet because generally speaking, it is the most flexible of the three. It's the most usable of the three simply because it's Microsoft and end users are generally more comfortable with the look and feel of Microsoft especially when you consider C-Pilot uh Power Apps, PowerBI, some of the other ancillary Microsoft products that people are used to using in other environments outside of D365. So these are some of the pros and cons of each of the solutions. I encourage you to also check out my YouTube video for deeper dive reviews of each of these three solutions so you can get a more dedicated view of what each of these systems can do. But this is a highle comparison of pros and cons of the three in today's AI and cloud-driven environment. Now, if you'd like to learn more about the ERP landscape and learn more about industry trends and objective reviews and rankings of different software solutions, be sure to check out our 2026 digital transformation report. You can find that by scanning the QR code right here or you can go to the links below. So, hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day.