Blue-eyed declaration of war

Here we go

"The JDK support contract between Oracle and SAP will be terminated by Oracle (effective 31. 12. 2013). Due to Oracle's termination of the agreement, SAP cannot provide Oracle JDK support coverage starting from January 2014. SAP has built a JDKcalled SAP JVM. For example, SAP JVM has been used by SAP NetWeaver for years; especially several thousand SAP NetWeaver 7.0 and 2004 Web AS Java systems have been migrated successfully to SAP JVM since 2011." (Source: SAP Note 1920326)

Is this a technical necessity, malice, or declaration of war?

The fact is that Oracle presented a counter-design to SAP Hana at its own in-house exhibition a few weeks ago in San Francisco.

Whether the in-memory computing of Larry Ellison is good enough, my employees cannot yet answer.

The fact is, however, that Oracles The new in-memory DB takes the same approach as IBM DB2 Blu: you flange something to the existing DB. Database and if you're lucky, everything moves a little faster now.

Blu again free of charge

For SAP-DB2-As always, the Blu option is also available free of charge to existing customers.

As in the past, the aim is to SAP-Business Suite users benefit at no additional cost.

At least that is what SAP and IBM have agreed on in a contract. Quasi at the last second, however, Vishal's Hana-troop recognized the danger and vetoed it.

Hana sells sluggishly and now comes IBM with the free update DB2 Blu.

My team has Blu customized on a test server: IBM has with SAP in the past two years, the in-memory computing component of DB2 completed.

The operational premiere and release were as IBM-Event planned at the SAP TechEd 2013 Amsterdam in early November.

But SAP refuses to release. Thus, any existing customer can use the DB2-Blu version, but may not use it in a production system.

A deadlock, the computer scientist would say.

Not quite, because there are valid contracts between IBM and SAP, so Vishal's Hana squad can only play for time.

Nevertheless, this state of affairs is very annoying and does not bring any reputation to either side.

"When two quarrel, a third rejoices," says my wife, who has found my notes for the E-3 column and comes into my study.

Theoretically Larry Ellisonbut it is more complicated.

Hana is not yet a mature Database. But it can do some spectacular feats. Thus, the combination of Business Suite, BW, Hana and DB2 Blu a variant.

"There you go, there's the solution," my wife is pleased and wants to go for another evening walk. "Wait," I say, because that was only one possible, technical approach.

What about the strategic dimension? Hasso and Vishal have worked with Hana made a claim to omnipotence: Hana is to be both an on-premise platform and a cloud solution, both OLAP as well as OLPT can.

Ultimately wants SAP not only the application level, but also the middleware (NetWeaver and SolMan) and the Database (Hana) control.

The operating system level is left to Suse Linux. And there is nothing to be earned with hardware anyway, see Sun.

Hana-Hardware

My anonymous e-mail acquaintance Michael Missbach sent me to Walldorf for the opening of the Cisco–SAP-Competence Center.

An important event with exciting discussions: Who has the best hardware for Hana has? Whether Hana virtualized productively? Can there be a Hana Cloud?

Unfortunately, I will be in Singapore on November 11 - I may send a substitute.

On the flight anyway I will meet with Hana since I have been running Windows 8 on my notebook. VMware Workstation with Linux and virtual Hana and access them from Windows with Hana Studio access (Intel i7 with 16 GB memory).

Hasso and Vishal have hoped to spend some time with Hana to have a unique selling proposition - now straddle Oracle and IBM in.

At the same time run the Hana-business is unsatisfactory. Existing customers are skeptical and follow the motto: Never change a running system!

A colleague is with Hana failed. The former CIO at Yazaki Europe Limited in Cologne motivated by SAP promised that BW performance would increase significantly.

All theory is gray. In practice brought Hana a weak result.

I had the incident described to me. My CIO colleague is really only guilty of one thing: he trusted Vishal Sikka's promises too much.

There are fantastic success stories and applications with HanaHowever, these are singular events in the wide ERP-world. The fewest Hana-findings can be applied to other scenarios.

Almost every Hana-project starts from scratch again: fails spectacularly or becomes a sensation.