Why Xerox Chose SAP Over Oracle To Support Its Global Reinvention

“Print’s not going away but we also need to diversify,” said Xerox SVP architecture and strategy Warren Birch. “We're serving our clients with a single offering under Xerox, but how do we then grow our adjacent business lines?”

Xerox is one of the three big players in a shrinking market for print. This uncomfortable position means it is having to reinvent itself, pushing for growth through a new global business services organisation and pursuing novel revenue streams.

At the same time, though, the US-based printer and copier company, which in its heyday was so successful that it became a verb, it is seeking to maintain its share of its core print business - witness the $1.5 billion acquisition of China’s Lexmark announced in December.

“We're maybe in a declining market but Xerox is still a $6.2 billion company”, said SVP architecture and strategy Warren Birch. The Lexmark purchase is about buying its way into the home office (known as “the A4 space”), as well as increasing its footprint in Asia, he explained.

“Print’s not going away but we also need to diversify. We're serving our clients with a single offering under Xerox, but how do we then grow our adjacent business lines?”

The answer, Xerox hopes, is to evolve from being known predominantly as a hardware company to being recognised as a global digital services and IT solutions provider with a world-class customer experience; to become a key player in the office of the future just as it was in the past.

Xerox wants to develop solutions that can help all sorts of businesses manage their offices more efficiently, including simplifying hybrid working and back office workflows, enabling mixed digital and print-based outputs and safeguarding IP. It wants to support these via managed services and solutions with seamless self-service and touchless interactions for both end-user customers and the channel partners through which Xerox does the majority of its business.

‘The ambition is one global business process with one technology selection’

A transformation like this does not happen overnight. It’s a multi-year endeavour requiring a great deal of planning, change management - and the modernisation and right-sizing of its enterprise IT stack.

“We’re a $6.2 million company with $10 billion of infrastructure,” said Birch. “It’s very expensive to run, plus a lot of it’s out of date. There’s a lot of legacy.”

These legacy systems are incompatible with Xerox’s modernisation plans. To complicate matters further, the company runs multiple systems across its geographies. The US business is based on Oracle, while in the other major region, Europe, SAP has been its key enterprise technology provider for the last 25 years.

The new business strategy can only be realised by modernising and consolidating the architecture, unifying it within and across territories, with a zero-tolerance approach to silos. “The ambition is one global business process with one technology selection,” said Birch. “Whether it’s ERP, CLM or CPQ it’s one of everything and one business process behind it.”

A decision had to be made on who the core provider should be. And to cut a long story short, Xerox chose SAP over Oracle.

Why Xerox chose SAP

Birch’s architecture team ran a full RFP with a scoring matrix to compare the two vendors on factors including technical and management fit.

While both had their strengths, SAP’s “clean core” strategy (which aims to minimise hard-to-support bespoke customisation) and modular platform approach aligned better with Xerox’s standardisation plans.

“From a technical point of view, we felt that SAP was more fully integrated as a suite of applications. We felt that Oracle was still very siloed in its product offerings, rather than a suite, and we wanted that real-time data, that instant flow and the confidence that we were being sold a solution rather than just individual siloed towers. So that's where Oracle lost out. They're both leaders in the market, so you can't go far wrong. We just felt that there was a more holistic story to be told on the SAP suite as a factory from end to end that we could take advantage of. It’s a holistic platform.”

The other deciding factor was being able to deal with a single accounts team. “When I spoke to Oracle I talked to X for OCI, I talked to Y for the something else, and it just felt a little bit disjointed. I like that single point contact, that partnership. And I have to say, SAP have been good mentors around the art of the possible, giving us guidance, giving us that consultation.”

Xerox is rolling out SAP S/4HANA cloud ERP, Business AI, the Customer Experience portfolio, Business Technology Platform (BTP) and supply management solutions over a three-year period.

In Europe, legacy on-premises SAP systems will be migrated these systems on a private cloud via the RISE with SAP managed programme. Meanwhile, in the US Oracle is being replaced by SAP. This process started in earnest last year and is being overseen by the integrator TCS. The aim is to go live by Q1 2026.

With the US as a testbed, Xerox plans to have implemented the new systems in Europe by early 2028, with other regions, including Canada which is currently “running AS/400s and other legacy systems”, also brought into the fold around that time.

Birch voiced his optimism about a positive outcome. Senior management has been doing a great job of explaining the reasons behind the move and how it fits with the business reinvention strategy, he said. As a result, preliminary internal design workshops have met with surprisingly few complaints or requests for change considering the scale of the move. “We've been really quite successful, so now the proof’s in the pudding when they see it and can touch it. That's the next phase.”

Warren Birch was speaking to Computing at SAP’s Sapphire event in Madrid this week.

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.