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