Larry Ellison took a swipe at SAP HANA during his keynote address Sunday night. By Monday afternoon, one of enterprise IT’s empires was prepared to strike back.

“For the last 24 hours, my eyebrows have been glued two-thirds of the way up my forehead, ” said an incredulous Steve Lucas, executive vice president of Business Analytics, Database and Technology at SAP. “My first reactions were ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.’ ”

The quotes that had Lucas irate came when Ellison was discussing Exadata X3, the latest incarnation of Oracle’s database. He touted its 26 terabytes of in-memory before drawing comparison with HANA, something he joked he would not do during the speech.

“I know that SAP has an in-memory machine. It’s a little smaller,” Ellison said.

Lucas says not so fast – SAP announced that HANA boasted 100 terabytes in-memory at Sapphire in May.

“These are the most baseless set of statements I’ve ever seen anyone in the market make,” Lucas said. “I don’t know where these people get their facts from, to me it’s absolutely mind-boggling.”

Sniping between the companies is nothing new, but Lucas said he was surprised at the form Ellison’s barbs took at this year’s conference.

“It wasn’t even the normal sort of half-truth. It was this “are you kidding me?” kind of a statement,” he said.

Check in on our guide page for more coverage of Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne.

Follow Adam Riglian on Twitter @AdamRiglian