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.

It should also be noted the products referenced by Oracle are only those shipped as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle currently has a number of other Application products (including PeopleSoft's Enterprise, JD Edwards' EnterpriseOne, and JD Edwards' World). A higher percentage of Oracle customers using those products are on versions which would not be considered "up-to-date."

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How about establishing a truth in advertising entity that monitors vendor claims for accuracy? Something like a JD Power for technology.

We have a well-defined process (see http://www.gartner.com/it/a... ) for assessing accuracy and appropriateness of all external use of Gartner content. In fact, we have a staff of people who review these requests every day. In this instance, we were not asked to review the proposed use of our content. If we had been asked, we would not have approved.