SAP: HANA will force out Oracle databases, IBM and Microsoft

After acquisition of Oracle of SUN Microsystems company and the subsequent start of all stack of the optimized strategy of Oracle, the management of SAP, being differentiated from the competitor, headed for freedom of choice for clients.

At the Sapphire conference last week SAP officially provided two alternatives to the Oracle database. All knew that it happens, but SAP announced that HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance), the columnar database prepared to in-memory technology will be available in June. SAP also announced certification of the database of the division of Sybase ASE for applications launch of SAP.

All this to the fact that by estimates of Gartner company, about 60% of clients of SAP apply the applications based on Oracle. The history of this coexistence ascends by the end of 1980 when Oracle had no proprietary corporate applications yet. The relations between two companies worsened when Oracle purchased competitors of SAP - PeopleSoft and JD Edwards in 2004, Siebel in 2005. Acquisition of Hyperion (2007), BEA (2008) and Sun (2009), apparently, did not help.

Generally, SAP has the reasons to provide to clients (especially to the clients using the Oracle database) a set of other options.

Option of HANA

HANA is not so much effort for an input in business of databases as an opportunity for SAP - to use power of conversion of computer processing and to attract new clients. HANA is intended for processing of analytical loadings and with its help in pilot projects customers estimated reduction of the analysis of products, clients and profitability from hours-long processes about one seconds. Long-term ambitions of SAP with its in-memory technology are intended in order that its database served both as transactional and as analytical, cutting down equipment expenses, the software of management at simultaneous performance improvement. It will allow to be discharged of Oracle (as well as of IBM DB2, the Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase ASE) as databases which work with SAP applications and also applications of analytics.

HANA is means of analytics and by the end of this year will also be configured as the basis for data for SAP Business Warehouse (BW).

Jim Hagemann Snabe, one of company executives of SAP, in an interview of InformationWeek told that SAP will strictly not advance ASE, but there is an opportunity - to receive more from customers as "many consider that they are pressed quotations when the question concerns databases therefore they look for alternative options". Speaking about partnership of SAP with IBM and Microsoft offering the DB2 and the Microsoft SQL Server, respectively, Sneyb added: "We do not wish to create conditions only of one database. We really want to select".

Sounds perfectly, but for ambitions of SAP concerning HANA and in-memory technology it does not make sense to promote promotion of other normal databases actively. HANA and its future versions - so wide perspective as far as it is surveyed by SAP.

There can pass several years still most conservative clients will agree to try HANA. Things are changing, the analyst of Gartner and the guru of databases Don Feinberg says. He notes that now Gartner receives many questions from clients of leaving from the Oracle database.

Analysts do not expect any sharp changes of number of the clients of SAP using the Oracle database. But in connection with the innovations available by means of HANA and constantly growing list of alternative databases, they expect only cost reduction of customers of SAP on Oracle databases.