The rivalry between Oracle and SAP deepened this morning when Oracle president Mark Hurd responded to SAP criticism by saying he had simply ‘told the truth’ about SAP’s database technology.
The latest spat between the two tech giants began last week when Hurd reportedly said: "I don’t like it when Oracle’s Exadata or the in-memory options get compared with SAP HANA.
"I don’t think it’s even comparable. HANA has to be programmed. What we told you about the new 12c database has nothing to do with that. You’re not rewriting anything." Regarding SAP, Hurd apparently added: "Forget them."
A riled Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder, responded in a blogpost: "When it comes to competition you should either know exactly what you’re talking about, or keep your mouth shut.
"Fact is: nobody likes to be replaced by a competitor’s solution. A good defence is to build a better product, not to bad mouth the competition with straight lies."
Acknowledging Plattner’s response to his comments regarding the firms’ respective database technology, Hurd said: "I appreciate they don’t like it but I’m just trying to tell people what it is.
"When you compare some of our engineered systems we have a very different view of what they do. So, for example, let’s take a product like Exadata. With Exadata, you take the database and you move it from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and anything on the database, if you will, above it – the middleware, the applications – it just runs.
"In the case of HANA, you put in a HANA and then you programme it. You write programmes for the HANA. That’s just work. If you want to do that work I think you should buy a HANA. If you don’t want to do that work you should buy something else.
"I’m sorry people have reacted the way they have but it’s the truth."
