"We believe the trend in compute is massively distributed commodity boxes, and while there is a market for products like HANA and Exadata, it is significantly smaller than optimistic descriptions by SAP and Oracle," says Cowen & Co. analyst.
SAP talked up HANA, mobile and its cloud unit powered by SuccessFactors amid lumpy first quarter results.
SAP plans to move its applications to its own Sybase-powered database platform, and mix in a heavy dose of HANA in-memory technology. The game plan: push long-time database partner Oracle out of the way, and take a bigger chunk of the enterprise IT-spending pie.
SAP and Oracle build out their cloud portfolios. Customers on both sides of the ERP equation may get confused.
The bet is that small and midsized companies are going to need to crunch unstructured data just like large outfits do.
Cloud computing, third party maintenance and customers fretting about IT debt may turn into a toxic view for on-premise enterprise software vendors.
SuccessFactors, which was just acquired by SAP, is making an acquisition of its own, with the purchase of Jobs2web for US$110 million.
If Oracle and SAP can gobble up cloud players there will be evolution not revolution.
Oracle said core SAP applications are now certified for use on its Exadata database machine.
Technology executives flocked to enterprise mobility demonstrations at SAP Sapphire. What remains to be seen is whether user interfaces will matter for the enterprise and all the vendors courting IT buyers.