Oracle co-president Mark Hurd is scheduled to reveal new details about the vendor’s business intelligence (BI) and analytics strategy, including new applications aimed at SAP customers, during an event on 4 April.
Hurd will be joined by Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice president of analytics and performance management, and will "unveil the latest advances in Oracle’s strategy for placing analytics into the hands of every one of your decision-makers," according an announcement on the Oracle web site.
Oracle’s Exalytics machine is set to be a main focus of the event, with a session discussing "integrated analytic applications" for Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software lines, as well as "new analytic solutions for SAP customers."
Further details of these products were not immediately available, nor was it clear whether they will be sold as a package with Exalytics, which competes with SAP’s HANA database. Both platforms incorporate in-memory processing, which moves data sets into RAM instead of pulling information off traditional disks, providing a significant performance boost.
SAP has begun rolling out a series of specialised analytic applications that run on top of HANA, but also intends to have HANA support transactional workloads such as those generated by SAP’s core Business Suite ERP system. That could cut into Oracle’s core database business, which supports many SAP installations today.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was somewhat disparaging of SAP’s ambitions for HANA on Oracle’s third-quarter earnings call. "I don’t think SAP is equipped to compete with us in the database business," Ellison said. "We’ve been working on in-memory technology for a decade. They just brought this out of the lab."
However, in response SAP noted that Oracle executives spent about 10 minutes of the roughly 45-minute call talking about HANA, a long time for a product it purportedly does not see as a threat.
Also on 4 April, Oracle is planning to introduce a product called Endeca Information Discovery, which will allow "casual users to search and explore data from any source, structured and unstructured, to quickly find the answers they need," according to the site.
The product is based on Oracle’s acquisition in October of search vendor Endeca.
It is not yet known whether the Endeca tool has been or will be integrated with Exalytics.
Right now, Oracle’s luck selling analytics to SAP customers is mixed, said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.
"If you include performance management, Hyperion’s strong point, then a lot," he said. "But if you talk about [Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition], some but not a lot."
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