Is SAP's HANA making Oracle sweat?

In the never-ending battle of royales trying all the time to gain supremacy in enterprise applications, the latest dig from Oracle co-president Mark Hurd saying in an interview that if HANA is the "most innovative" thing that SAP can do, "good luck to them" is clearly indicative of the heat that Oracle is beginning to feel.

In an interview with Computerworld's Chris Kanaracus last Friday, Hurd referred to SAP's latest armour against Oracle, an in-memory database called HANA, which can crunch enormous amounts of data and play a near-real time analytics role, much faster than a traditional Oracle database. Oracle is now banking a lot upon its Oracle Fusion to step up the growth momentum.

The growing popularity of SAP HANA amongst CIOs, who are wanting to deal with the colossal big data, as an in-memory computing tool has led SAP executives to term HANA as the fastest growing product in SAP's history. SAP's co-CEO Bill McDermott even declared it was "the fastest growing software product in the history of the world."

Hurd is reported to have said in the interview, "Are you going to take your core ERP and change out the infrastructure, with the risk that it falls apart, the risk that it doesn't work? Our view has been for SAP, particularly, if they want to spend their time and money going after database, that's great. ... If that's their most innovative thing, good luck to them."

It may be recalled that while speaking to Dataquest recently,       , SAP said, "