SAP vs ORACLE, the database market is reshuffling?

In the past several days, ERP on HANA and ERP on ASE has successfully taken some big orders which were on Oracle platform previously. The HANA-Sybase Database Platform (HSDP, as officially referred by SAP) has shown its impact on the market, and the future of the database market looks rather interesting from this point.

After SAP brought up HANA, and bought and integrated Sybase successfully, SAP has announced its goal is to be the No. 2 database company in the world by 2015. Oracle and SAP are now competing head to toe on either the application or the database market. However, I think these two companies have differed fundamentally in their view to the relationships between application and database. Oracle is essentially a database company, and it thinks applications should be developed and adjusted given what the underlying database can offer. SAP, on the other hand, put more emphasis on the application side, and requires that database meets the application requirement. The good thing with Oracle is: it can focus on the database development itself, adding new features, improving its performance and making it more powerful. However, currently SAP's major goal is to package its ERP and business analytics products, which is already a big share of the overall database market, with its own database platforms. Making the database seamlessly integrated with its applications obviously gives big advantage. In fact, the current development process of HANA and Sybase has already shown this: A feature development is firstly evaluated whether it should be put in application side or in database side. In this view, Oracle may be better at providing a generic data platform at this time, but in no way it can provide as good performance for SAP applications.

HANA system may looks expensive now. But as claim by the HANA team: we're making best product, not the cheapest, pricing is not an issue given its superior performance, especially for the SAP ERP products. For those customer who cannot afford the high cost of memory, SAP also have an alternative plan: hook up HANA with Sybase IQ, which is a low cost and yet powerful data analytics system. Overall, the full stack of database/warehouse products SAP now has in hand, gives it great flexibility in offering the customers the right package.