Sybase ASE has only a fraction of the database market share held by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, 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.
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 , but could be positioned for transactional systems as well.
Database migrations are typically no small task,
Meanwhile, SAP is also looking to take advantage of Oracle's recent decision to . Hewlett-Packard's Integrity servers are based on Itanium chips and run its HP-UX OS. SAP has committed long-term to HP-UX for both its business applications and ASE, according to a statement.
In addition, Red Hat is poised to offer customers the ability to run SAP software with ASE on its RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) OS, the company said.
Down the road, SAP plans to certify Sybase ASE for other products in its portfolio, including CRM (customer relationship management), NetWeaver Portal and NetWeaver Business Warehouse.
The Sybase ASE announcement, with its focus on reducing operational costs for customers, stands apart from SAP's around mobility, in-memory computing and SaaS (software as a service).
In another announcement aimed at the installed base on Tuesday, SAP said a new Innovations 2010 "enhancement pack" for Business Suite 7 users is now available. The enhancement packs are supposed to give customers new features without the pain of a full upgrade, but in practice, the
The new pack includes more than 300 new capabilities across various functional areas and industries.
SAP intends to increase the pace of releases for the enhancement packs, according to co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe.
"We think we can deliver quarterly enhancements," he said during a keynote address.
The IDG News Service