Why SAP HANA is a Better Choice than Oracle exalytics____oracle

Note:this piece is co-written with Aiaz Kazi, head of Technology Marketing at SAP

On Sunday night, during Larry Ellison's lackluster Open World keynote, Oracle finally announced their in-memory a Ppliance dubbed Exalytics, validating SAP ' s strategy but to failing impress. Before I comment on the announcement, it's worth a walk down memory lane to better understand what am behind their Cement.

In SAPPHIRE now, SAP the announced its technology vision of non-disruptive innovation by combining In-memory , cloud, and mobility.  At the heart of this strategy are SAP HANA, an in-memory database. SAP HANA started its life out as a real-time analytics attachment to SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver Business, and SAP Businessobjects–delivering real-time analytics to SAP customers.

At the time Larry Ellison poked fun in Hasso Plattner, an SAP co-founder, saying this Ellison wanted to know what  Hasso was getting he drugs from. A few months later, in Oracle's September earnings call, Larry did a about-face and announced-Oracle would release I  TS own in-memory database before SAP could get to market. He didn ' t win, the RACE:SAP launched HANA on Dec 1, 2010.

The announcement explained that "SAP HANA is a integrated database and calculation layer that allows of MA  Ssive quantities of real-time data in main memory to provide immediate the from results and analyses.  This is business at the speed of thought– ' transactions + Analytics ' and not analytics in isolation. A couple of recent tweets from Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of SAP Executive Board, capture our direction:

Vsikka: #HANA ' s endeavor:serve the new real-time. On-the-fly Analytics, planning on real-time data. Cutting layers, bridging divides, open systems.

Vsikka:new real-time = OLTP & OLAP. Unlimited scale & Open systems. Text & Structured data. Non-disruptive Evolution & unprecedented applications.

Since that time, we ' ve begun delivering amazing new applications to top of SAP HANA. At SAPPHIRE now (May) and again at SAP TechEd last month, customers and you provided testimonials to the value  SAP HANA. Going forward, HANA would become the Next-generation platform that combines in-memory and cloud seamlessly and a "mobile-fi  RST "approach to developing apps. Industry and technical influencers, customers, and the have validated our approach.

On the other hand, let's take a look at what Oracle has announced–18 after SAP. Personally, I ' m mostly underwhelmed for both technical and customer reasons:

Technical: I had expected Vishal would provide detailed technical analysis of Exalytics into his blog but  Took a good look at Oracle's new product, he had a "there are no there, there" reaction in this impromptu video. As he tweeted the night of the announcement:

Vsikka:exalytics:15 yr-old TimesTen + yr-old Essbase + sun HW = Same old aggregates, layers, complexity & closed. Totally misses new real-time.

The announcement suggests that Exadata needs exalytics for analytics acceleration, which means Oracle feels like it must a  Ccelerate the accelerator. SAP HANA is exactly opposite of this kind of afterthought:the HANA architecture is built ground-up for the new reality of Real real-time applications.

And how does Oracle support the totality of big Data? If we take a look at the V's of Big data-volume, velocity, and variety-it looks like Oracle expects E for each one:–volume (Exadata), Velocity (Exalytics), and variety (exa-tobeannounced). It ' s exasperating.

customer-centric: In attempting a retro-ibm style move with their hardware infatuation, Oracle has forgotten the  Customer. I watched hours of videos and read litanies of blogs I can ' t find but to easy answers do you questions:how know E  XA appliance to with and when? How do you cost-effectively manage the growing litter of appliances or engineered systems? How do you extend a "engineered system" is not open or provide choice? Where are the applications that run on these Exa engineered systems?

I suspect the answers are:it doesn ' t matter; You are want an all-oracle optimized hardware stack.

One more point of contrast.   SAP is about to offer HANA as a database under SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. With which, we provide our customers a choice of whether they continue with relational databases, or whether they want to E   Nable a real-time data warehouse by adopting SAP HANA. Would Oracle offer that type of choice? Only, it would seem, if it's willing to risk undercutting its core database franchise. This leaves me wondering how to serious Oracle is about exalytics.

So, while Exalytics fits perfectly to Larry Ellison ' s strategy, the far bigger is question it whether to fits into? SAP HANA simply is a better choice.