SAP Goes After Oracle's Database with ASE

IDG News Service — SAP will finish porting its ERP (enterprise resource planning) application to the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database later this year, giving customers now running Oracle (ORCL) and other platforms a lower-cost alternative, the company announced Tuesday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.

Sybase ASE has only a fraction of the database market share held by Oracle, IBM (IBM) and Microsoft (MSFT), but it is widely used by financial institutions. SAP noted this in its announcement, saying its ERP customers will now get to use the same database "that powers Wall Street."

Future versions of SAP ERP will be "certified out-of-the-box" with Sybase ASE releases, SAP said. In addition, Sybase ASE's life cycle will be "fully synchronized with SAP maintenance policies to simplify release and deployment planning for customers."

The combination of ASE and SAP's business software will mean customers can deal with a single company "focused on efficient business operations and on providing attractive licensing and maintenance terms and conditions," SAP said.

It's not quite clear how much customers could save buying ASE compared to Oracle, although such estimates are hard to pinpoint, given the heavy discounting off list price that often occurs in software contract negotiations.

Also, there's no telling how Oracle would respond in terms of pricing or customer incentives, should SAP manage to siphon off a significant amount of database revenue.

In any event, recent tests are already showing significant "price-to-performance" improvements from running SAP on ASE in place of competing databases, Sybase CEO John Chen said in an interview. Sybase is now run as an independent subsidiary of SAP.

The savings may grow, since Sybase technicians are still doing some system tuning, Chen said.

Also unclear was how ASE will coexist with SAP's HANA in-memory database over time. HANA, a newer product than ASE, has so far been mostly targeted at analytic workloads, but could be positioned for transactional systems as well.

There's unlikely to be serious friction between the two products, according to Chen. For one, it will be some time before HANA is ready to handle the transactional workload demands of large SAP customers, and ASE has a healthy installed base that SAP would "do well to serve."

The question now is how successful SAP will be moving non-ASE shops over to the platform.

Database migrations are typically no small task, something Chen readily admitted. "It's not the easiest thing on Earth. [Migrations] need a level of commitment and investment."

A lot depends on how the applications that the original database supports were written, he added. "If there's no multi-threading, and minimal triggers, then technically, it should be move over, compile and run."

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