SAP has begun rolling out a series of specialized 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 mocked SAP's ambitions for HANA on Oracle's this week. "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 April 4, 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.

That product is based on Oracle's of search vendor Endeca.