Months after sparring over SAP HANA and Oracle Exalytics, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reportedly couldn’t keep from referring to SAP’s marquee in-memory product as if it were actually an unthreatening nine-year-old in a frilly pink dress compared to Oracle’s new Exadata X3. Ellison took his shots at SAP during the Oracle OpenWorld user conference now underway in San Francisco.

Business Insider’s Julie Bort recounts Ellison’s comments:

“SAP has an in-memory database that’s a little smaller than what we offer,” Ellison said. “I think her name is Hana. I promised Mark [Hurd] that I would not mention them [SAP]. I’m glad to keep my promise.”

Ouch.

Steve Lucas, who oversees business analytics and database technologies at SAP, answered that HANA is different, in that it spans everything from traditional to predictive analytics to sentiment analysis:

Making an old-school database faster by putting it in a superfast piece of hardware is not going to hurt Hana, Lucas says.

“You’ve got a company with a $10 billion database albatross around their neck, and a multibillion hardware albatross around their neck, so their solution is to throw more hardware at the same old tired software. It’s a myopic view that what companies need is a faster database,” Lucas said. “It absolutely fries my brain.”

On a separate note, Computerworld’s Chris Kanaracus outlines some of the economics around Oracle Exadata:

Exadata machines are big money-makers for Oracle because they also run a lot of separately licensed database software, which provides steady annual maintenance payments. The combination has meant that a fully-loaded Exadata box tends to require a significant investment from customers.

But Ellison seems keen on getting midsized customers into the Exadata market. He announced a new “eighth-rack” X3 edition that has a list price of $200,000. It is faster than larger Exadata configurations released in 2010 and 2008, according to a slide.

** UPDATE:  SAP CTO Vishal Sikka weighed in on the Experience SAP HANA site, saying Oracle’s customers and shareholders deserve more honesty from Ellison:

The statement Mr Ellison made about HANA, when talking about the release of a new Exadata machine, that has 4TB of DRAM and 22TB of SSD, is false.  He referred to HANA being “a small machine” with 0.5TB of memory. He said his machine has 26TB of memory, which is also wrong (SSD is not DRAM and does not count as memory, HANA servers also use SSDs for persistence).

Read Sikka’s full response here. 

Last year, just before Thanksgiving, a jury in California delivered a whopping $1.3 billion verdict in favor of Oracle in its IP theft lawsuit against SAP and its former subsidiary TomorrowNow.  That immediately set in motion a lot of tongue-wagging over whether the damages awarded were excessive.

Last week, just before the start of Labor Day weekend, the same judge in the case sided with SAP’s appeal that the figure wasn’t based on actual damages, calling it “grossly excessive” and “contrary to the weight of evidence.”

As you can imagine, SAP applauded the judge’s decision.  Oracle, not so much.

“There was voluminous evidence regarding the massive scope of the theft, clear involvement of SAP management in the misconduct and the tremendous value of the IP stolen. We believe the jury got it right and we intend to pursue the full measure of damages that we believe are owed to Oracle,” the company said in a statement.

So what now?  The judge instead knocked the judgment way down to $272 million, a far cry from the original $1.7 billion Oracle thought it was due, and closer to the $40 million SAP said was fair compensation for TomorrowNow’s actions. Oracle can either let the judgment stand – which seems unlikely given their statement yesterday – or request a new trial.

Given all that it has on its plate, Rachel King thinks Oracle might just want to call it a day.

10.) Tips for successful SAP implementations
Not having the right skills on an ERP implementation team and lack of buy-in from employees once it’s launched are the two biggest causes of ERP implementation failures. Putting business-focused outcomes rather than deadlines in the contract is one way to ensure focused, and therefore successful, projects. In this post, learn more about ensuring successful SAP implementations.

9.) SAP weighs in on Oracle-Sun, Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal earned a little wrath from SAP after it suggested that SAP CEO Leo Apotheker could smooth the way for an Oracle-Sun merger. With Oracle and the European Commission headed for a showdown, not to mention whatever competitive advantage Oracle may gain by bundling hardware, databases and applications, SAP may have more to say about the deal.

8.) Moving SAP, hardware and all, into the cloud
Does it make sense for companies to continue to own their servers and desktop computers? In this post, one analyst suggested that companies can achieve significant cost savings by moving their non-mission-critical SAP infrastructure into the cloud.

7.) What does SAP have to say about the Oracle-Sun deal?
You can always count on SAP executive Bill McDermott to give a piece of his mind on what SAP often refers to as its “next largest competitor.” During an interview on SAP’s first quarter earnings in 2009, McDermott launched into his take on the Oracle-Sun acquisition.

6.) Jon Reed: SAP to start paying more attention to R/3 users
SAP Mentor Jon Reed took part in some high-level discussions at SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix, Ariz. He says that SAP may be pulling back from its emphasis on upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 and will start paying more attention to its installed base of R/3 4.6C/4.7 users.

5.) Who wants SAP on the iPhone?
When SAP and Sybase announced in March a new effort to make SAP mobile applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry, it raised the question of the promises and perils of the consumerization of IT and the challenges it presents, not only to productivity but to IT departments.

4.) Is certification the ticket to a more successful SAP implementation?
SAP implementations rarely finish on time or on budget. Our readers lent some interesting advice on how to avoid ERP implementation failure.

3.) What’s the real trend in failed SAP projects?
A claim by Shane and Co. that a failed SAP ERP implementation was a catalyst for the jewelry company’s descent into bankruptcy sent the SAP blogosphere into a tizzy in early 2009. But one expert pointed out that it’s not the software’s fault that you didn’t put it in right, and that blame for Shane and Co.’s failings lies squarely with the management team and the system integrator.

2.) Who’s taking ERP market share from SAP, Oracle?
By a wide margin, SAP and Oracle remained one and two, respectively, in the North American enterprise software market. But in looking at this year’s market numbers, the more interesting question was: Who took market share from them?

1.) Will SAP buy Tibco?
The question of whether SAP would buy Tibco first came up when Oracle bought BEA Systems. Many thought that SAP needed to boost its own middleware, SAP NetWeaver, and that Tibco would make for an ideal acquisition. That thought resurfaced in 2009 after Tibco announced that it was offering cloud computing tools. And while a deal never materialized in 2009, many believe that the vendor is due for a big acquisition in 2010.

The editorial, published Nov. 5^th, reads, in part:

But since the Oracle merger investigation began, some observers have questioned whether the [European] Commission is holding up the merger at the urging of Germany’s SAP, which is a partner but also a competitor of Oracle-even though SAP does not compete with Sun.

It references “a multibillion-dollar industrial espionage lawsuit pending against SAP in the U.S.”

And concludes:

Normal isn’t the word we’d use to describe such behavior. The timing of the letter suggests that Mr. Apotheker either believed, or wanted Oracle to believe, that he could smooth the merger review if he so desired. Nothing came of the offer, and the Commission now seems poised to block the deal. Only the antitrust mandarins in Brussels know for sure if they’d act differently if Mr. Ellison had accepted Mr. Apotheker’s “invitation.”

SAP issued a press release yesterday refuting the claim:

The Wall Street Journal speculated last week that SAP CEO Leo Apotheker may have intended to offer facilitating the Oracle-Sun merger in the ongoing European Commission’s review of the Oracle-Sun deal when he wrote a letter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in September. The letter was leaked to The Wall Street Journal.

SAP strongly rejects the misleading speculation in The Wall Street Journal opinion piece. SAP has always said that it stands for openness and choice in the market. In light of the proposed Oracle-Sun merger, we, like many others, have concerns about customer choice in the database market and the future open licensing of Java. We communicated our concerns to both Oracle and Sun at the working level as far back as the end of July 2009.

Since there was no response, our CEO Leo Apotheker took the initiative and wrote to both Oracle and Sun CEOs in the middle of September to voice our concerns again, offer a dialogue and attempt to clarify the issues. We have not heard back from Oracle, but instead found Leo Apotheker’s letter leaked to the press last week. This is both telling and disappointing as it demonstrates that there is no real interest by Oracle to listen and explain how it wants to ensure the required level of customer choice in the database market as well as open access to Java.

Java is an important programming language that has brought about significant innovation within the entire IT industry – from large-scale enterprise applications to mobile devices and payment cards.

SAP has raised the same concerns with the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission as well as a number of other antitrust authorities throughout the world, and will continue to cooperate with these agencies in an open and transparent manner in the interests of its customers and partners. We at SAP have the highest respect for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission as well as for any other antitrust and regulatory agency in the countries in which we do business.

Leaked letters, “telling and disappointing” reactions and “misleading speculation” all make for good drama, particularly when SAP and Oracle are involved, be it over sailboats, retail software acquisitions, third party maintenance lawsuits or European regulators.

But SAP does seem to have some legitimate concern about the deal, both around Oracle’s potential ownership of Java and whatever competitive advantage it may gain by bundling hardware, databases and applications. SAP CTO Vishal Sikka said as much in a recent blog regarding Java (emphasis his):

The Java industry is currently going through important changes, and there are many discussions around the openness of Java and the Java Community Process (JCP). To date, the JCP is heavily dominated by Sun Microsystems which was not always to the benefit of all parties interested in Java. Java is the lifeblood of the IT industry, and IT is a fundamental underpinning of the way business is conducted in the 21st century. The technical interfaces that are jointly developed by the community should be immune from bias, and the community should be able to work even closer together in the spirit of cooperation to continue the Java success story. To ensure the continued role of Java in driving economic growth, we believe it is essential to transition the stewardship of the language and platform into an authentically open body that is not dominated by an individual corporation.

With Oracle and the European Commission headed for a showdown, it certainly looks like SAP will have more opportunities to state its case.

The question remains, whether the EC or SAP has the strength to stop it and whether Sun has the wherewithal to withstand a long negotiation. Some Sun VARS are already chafing.

Do you think SAP will have any influence? Should they?

Vinnie Mirchandani for one is happy the EC is getting involved. Does the tech industry need government intervention? Without question, Vinnie says.

It screams for periodic government scrutiny. Especially when vendors pull shenanigans like misleading and scaring customers on the use of third party maintenance to protect their 95% gross margins. Or selling printer ink at  $5,000 a gallon and still misleading consumers about ink levels in their cartridges so they buy more prematurely of that precious commodity.

Oracle also filed more allegations in the case – filing a fourth amended complaint that attempts to make Siebel and Oracle’s database technology part of the lawsuit.

Oracle now alleges that SAP extended TomorrowNow’s illegal business model to Siebel just days after Oracle completed the acquisition. It also says that TomorrowNow’s environments ran on copies of Oracle database software that weren’t licensed for commercial or production use, according to court documents. SAP refused to purchase Oracle database licenses for TomorrowNow’s use, “even though as an authorized Oracle database reseller, they knew full well the permissible uses of database copies,” the document states.

Oracle certainly hasn’t been shy about piling on the charges in this lawsuit – amending its original complaint four times over the past two years. One now has to wonder what this means for Rimini Street, and whether it will now be dragged into this lawsuit.

Often referred to as the cash cow of the enterprise software world, maintenance is a perennial hot-button issue, but very much so in the past year. SAP’s attempt to raise its maintenance and support fees was met with criticism, and similar discontent is brewing over Oracle maintenance and support fees in the Oracle customer base.

While SAP has made strides with its new Enterprise Support KPI program (though we haven’t seen many details), many companies are still interested in third-party support. Ray Wang told me a few months back that of the more than 900 clients he had talked to about the issue, between 60% and 70% were interested in exploring the option.

It’s just that there aren’t a lot of options for them to explore.

Rimini Street is the big game in town when it comes to third-party support. It just announced a global expansion of its tax and regulatory updates for more than 100 countries. In May, it announced the rollout of third-party support services for SAP R/3 releases, ECC 5.0, ECC 6.0 and BW.

Oracle maintains in its motion regarding Rimini Street that it’s perfectly legal to provide third-party support. But does merely calling into question the legality of the business practices of the biggest game in town suggest that third-party support is in for more of a battle?

Will Oracle’s latest move discourage the market for this type of service?

So when I even mentioned Oracle yesterday during an interview on SAP’s first quarter earnings, he gladly launched into his take on Oracle’s recent Sun acquisition unprompted.

 ”I think they have introduced a tremendous level of risk into their business model by making this wild foray into hardware,” McDermott said. “They know nothing about hardware and now they’ve made a move into the hardware business.”

He added that they’re also proving that they’re running out of software companies to buy.

He also didn’t look too enviously upon Oracle’s idea of providing one-stop shopping for customers either.  Larry Ellison said in a press release issued during last week’s announcement that “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves.”

“I actually can understand why from their point of view they think it’s the right thing to do,” McDermott said. “Because they have not innovated anything. They went on an acquisition trail and the monster is hungry, it has to continue have another acquisition to keep its numbers in line with the capital markets’ expectations.”

SAP, on the other hand, will continue to focus on “being a good partner to companies like IBM,” giving customers the best value and not locking them into one vendor.

And that begs the acquisition question. After the Oracle-Sun deal went down, the blogosphere was abuzz with rumors that IBM was looking to buy SAP — IBM’s best shot at competing with Oracle/Sun.

On this note, co-CEO Leo Apotheker told the Wall Street Journal that IBM is a solid business partner, but customers signaled they wanted it to remain independent.

But is partnering with IBM enough? Joshua Greenbaum has an interesting post this week about why the Sun deal, and Oracle’s subsequent ownership of Java (which McDermott said he isn’t concerned about) may make IBM and Oracle closer allies. And why, in that light, SAP should start looking for some new partners to balance off a growing “IBM/Oracle axis of competition,” Greenbaum writes. Strengthening ties with the sponsors of those “I’m a PC and I’m four and a half,” commercials may be a good move.

As an SAP customer, what are your thoughts and concerns on increasing consolidation in the industry?