Oracle’s Larry Ellison basically declared war on HANA.

HANA is SAP’s flagship product and it integrates database, data processing and application platform capabilities in-memory. Ellison was hinting about the announcement next week concerning the addition of an in-memory option for the Oracle database, a direct response to the success that SAP has had with HANA.

According to SAP, HANA has been its fastest growing, most successful product ever and Oracle is not sitting idly by as it brings an almost identical feature to its Oracle Database product. As Ellison puts it, “Virtually every existing application that runs on top of the Oracle database will run dramatically faster by simply turning on the new in-memory feature. Our customers don’t have to make any changes to their applications whatsoever; they simply flip on the in-memory switch, and the Oracle database immediately starts scanning data at a rate of billions or tens of billions of rows per second.”

SAP isn’t sitting idle either. SAP and Hortonworks recently entered into a resale agreement allowing SAP to resell the company’s Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). According SAP, this allows them to offer their users a complete enterprise architecture that leverages what they claim is the industry’s first 100% open-source data platform powered by Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is a powerful open-source software that aids in finding business insights from huge amounts of structured and unstructured data quickly and at a lower cost than they may be experiencing today.

Not dull on the marketing front either, with SAP and communications giant AT&T joining forces to allow AT&T to broadly offer the company’s suite of mobile app creation, security and mobile management software to its customers.

SAP has far to go to really threaten Oracle’s customer base but they are making progress.

This may be why on September 19th of this year Gartner recognized SAP as a “Leader in Industry Analyst Firm’s 2013 Single-Instance ERP Magic Quadrant for Product-Centric Mid-market Companies” for the third year in a row. Their “Business All-In-One”, which runs on SAP HANA as well as SAP’s Sysbase Adaptive Server Enterprise, is deployed both on premise and through a private cloud offering.

If your company has decided to implement or already uses SAP, the growing number of application opportunities, better business intelligence through data and need to meet increasingly critical business demands may make it wise to consult with experts on how best to incorporate these tools into your business. There are a number of offshore firms that can provide you with lower cost expertise, as well as, strong track records in implementing and developing for both SAP and Oracle.

By leveraging these offshore experts, and adapting these platforms to meet current and future business challenges, you will get the most out of your investment in these powerful platforms.

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