Oracle and SAP: The Milagro Database War
May 3, 2012
I received an email inducing me to read “Hana and Exalytics: SAP’s Hype Versus Oracle’s FUD.” The write up takes a serious or at least semi serious at Milagro database war. If you are not familiar with the Milagro Beanfield War, you might find the write up a loose allegory of what’s happening in traditional data management companies and the NoSQL farmers.
The Information Week write up does not talk about the real story, however. What we get is two giants of traditional enterprise software squabbling over which traditional data management system is most likely to keep the Fortune 1000, government agencies, and big educational institutions within the traditional enterprise software corral.
With regard to Oracle, the write up asserts:
Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Safra Catz have missed few opportunities to discredit Hana in recent months. But executive VP Thomas Kurian took the slams a level deeper on Friday with a one-hour Webinar clearly intended to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of would-be Hana customers. The session was billed as an Exalytics seminar, but each point set up a contrast with Hana. Kurian claimed, among other things, that SAP’s product costs five times to 50 times more than Exalytics and that it doesn’t support SQL (relational) or MDX (multidimensional) query languages, requiring apps to be rewritten to run on the new database.
The Information Week write up reports:
SAP’s hype about these apps is getting a little ahead of deployed market reality. Both Hana and Oracle Exalytics can point to dramatic before-and-after differences in query speeds. (Even SAP grants that Exalytics can accelerate queries.) SAP says the real payoff from Hana will be in transforming business processes, not just accelerating queries. But we haven’t seen enough solid, real-world customer examples documenting transformed business competitiveness.
No problem on my end because this is a great example of desperation marketing. First, the “real” news outfit has sensationalized what is a continuing dust up between two companies which are more similar than different. Both have a great deal to lose as the NoSQL approach to data management gains momentum. In a resource starved economic farm land moving to open source or lower cost options for data management is a reality.
Second, the traditional enterprise software vendors face assaults on numerous fronts, so fighting with a known enemy is easy. The fact that these two companies define the problem in traditional ways, using traditional methods, and from traditional technical castles is an indication of how disconnected the firms are. So why not mention the real problem both companies face?
Third, will the victor of the Oracle SAP fight alter what is happening across the broader landscape of data management? In my opinion, no. As economic concerns force CFOs to take drastic actions, the traditional vendors will have to find new ways to generate revenue. My thought is that sham battles are like 4th of July fireworks. They are interesting, noisy, but have little impact when the smoke clears.
Open source is having an increasing impact on data management plus taxonomy, search, and content processing. Perhaps I missed this angle in the Information Week write up? Perhaps Information Week owes its very existence to traditional software and enterprise technology methods. The new world of data management may marginalize Information Week itself. In 1980, the death of printed tabloids aimed at the corporate information technology was unthinkable. Today it is thinkable and happening. Is Information Week a combatant in the data management bean field war?
My view is that the real story is the open source software shift. Oracle and SAP face more trouble from the open source and NoSQL world than from one another.
Stephen E Arnold, May 3, 2012
Sponsored by TheTrendPoint
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