In the war to win mindshare on Big Data, SAP certainly is not pulling its punches.

In a sit-down session with the media two days ago, SAP put out its own campaign on why they were the right vendors to go to for Big Data compared to a competitor like Oracle or EMC.

It certainly seems like the vendors are really bullish about Big Data in the region in early 2013.

Head of database and technology marketing, Karim Mohamed, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan, gave three reasons why it made sense to go with SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance) for big data over their competitors.

Firstly, “SAP is vendor agnostic,” he said. At least it isn’t like Oracle’s Exalogic/Exadata platform, which locks you to their platform and their Sun hardware. With SAP HANA, you can go with any hardware vendor like Dell or IBM.

Secondly, SAP has been working on this space since the beginning. “Wouldn’t you rather work with somebody that is on version three of the product rather than on version one?” Karim countered.

And lastly, with Sybase Mobile enterprise, SAP has a great mobile software database stack, which often feeds into the use cases that Big Data looks at.

Whilst I would somewhat agree with Karim on his latter two points, his first one is a bit of a toss-up as vendor lock-in can be both a boon and a bane. Oracle, when I met them, argued that having their own hardware allowed them to optimize the best solution for their customers.

But what do the customers want from Big Data?

Still, arguing over which architecture is better for end users is semantics in my opinion, because end users don’t buy on specifications, they buy on solutions, as I’ve argued before.

So rather than talking about which architecture is the best, tell me about the use cases, or better yet, get your customers to do so.

According to Michael Barnes, Vice President and Research Director at analyst firm Forrester, Big Data’s use cases, for now, reside mainly in highly commoditized businesses where “relationships are everything”.

Mining the data to get to really know the customer to prevent churn is the key, and key sectors include retail, finance and telcos.

These are the market opportunities that SAP sees as well moving forward in the next two quarters.

According to Anthony McMahon, senior VP of database and technology SAP Asia Pacific, he sees a few key target audiences for selling SAP’s HANA.

Firstly, and a no-brainer, is to up-sell existing SAP businesses that they can benefit from Big Data, and SAP can pilot new projects with them.

Secondly, HANA can be used to help business warehousing operations who have “inflexible traditional database backends”, said Anthony, and the main benefits are speed and flexibility.

For example, he cited a Hong Kong insurer who managed to bring down the time taken to do a risk assessment from days to hours.

Also, making this switch is not a huge investment as the HANA appliance sits on top of the traditional RDBMS (Relational database management system) which hosts the data, so you don’t have to throwaway your existing server and storage infrastructure.

For now, 95 percent of HANA sales is direct — a telling point that most end users in Asia Pacific are just beginning to pilot Big Data solutions — but Anthony is hoping to move 40 percent of the SAP HANA through channels by 2015.

Big data is like the cloud-season all over again circa early 2009.

Having hit a threshold of mainstream respectability, every major IT vendor was talking about cloud in 2009 and trying to put their mindshare stamp on the space.

A few years down the road, the cloud is firmly entrenched in the lexicon of IT folks and even mainstream media.

The current hot IT meme of choice for 2012?

Big Data, as every big IT vendor — especially those in the storage and software space — is talking about some form of it.

If you haven’t heard of Big Data yet, at it’s heart it is where systems collect massive amounts of data and act on it in real-time.

It promises to deliver a world where machines, through self-learning and the ability to spot patterns, help us solve problems. Key technologies include cloud, virtualization, and in-memory databases, just to name a few.

At a media luncheon yesterday in Singapore, enterprise software behemoth Oracle shared with us their vision of big data as their CTO for Oracle Asia Research and Development Centres Kevin Walsh was in town.

Their pitch was that although a lot of people are doing big data, from the likes of Google to SAP, nobody has the breadth of the software stack that Oracle has, and you need to interact with the stack to execute the big data paradigm.

“Build-it-yourself does not scale well,” warned Kevin. Assembling your own Apache Hadoop or Google MapReduce project could be good for trying out smaller projects, but would be a headache once you scale up.

He also mentioned that beyond the software stack, they also have native hardware capabilities to build their own customized machines which will run faster for Big Data solutions, courtesy of their acquisition of Sun.

Whilst one could quibble with any big vendor on nitty gritty negatives for all the good points that they tout — general higher price points than smaller firms, vendor lock-in, integration of varied acquired products in the portfolio, ability to work with other vendors, etc. — to me it doesn’t matter.

Especially for something still new like Big Data , I can get bet you that CTOs and CIOs could care less about what your product offering is but what it can do for them. Enterprise sales are typically not about specs but about solutions.

So a word to vendors: Don’t drown journalists in a flood of architecture specs. What is not as important as why,and most importantly how.

The million dollar question is: “How do I leverage Big Data so that it makes my business better?”

Big Data in ASEAN markets

So I asked the Oracle folks not to tell me about specs, but what challenges their customers were facing in moving to Big Data and the problems they were trying to solve. And that is where the answers got a lot more interesting.

For ASEAN, Kaleem Chaudry, senior director for enterprise technology at Oracle, the bright sparks for Big Data for the next six months reside in a couple of key sectors: Telcos, banks and government.

For telcos, especially for prepaid markets, there isn’t a lot of loyalty and churn is prevalent. By mining data from millions of call data records, a telco can pull information they need to selectively target customers and retain them.

For banks, a use case that Oracle is seeing is about building up accurate risk profiles by mining lots of details of potential loaners.

For government, some use cases include homeland security and dengue fever monitoring. By assimilating various data streams from different agencies, Big Data systems are able to spot unusual patterns in the data that may prove to be a threat to citizens.

Big Data is still in a very early stage in its evolution. It’s no surprise that the industries that invest in pilot projects are those in traditionally aggressive cut-throat industries like telcos and finance, and governments who have deeper pockets.

It might take some time before customers are wiling to share how they are using Big Data to solve their problems.

However, if you’re a vendor in this space, you can definitely come up with interesting ways to explain why Big Data is important and fight for mindshare.

In the first of this new series, we interviewed Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle, to hear his views on the company’s new WebLogic Server 12c, an application server designed to help enterprises move their applications to the cloud.

The software supports the latest Java standards including Java Standard Edition version 7 and is the first to comply with the full Java Enterprise Edition 6 platform profile.

Q: WebLogic Server 12c is geared towards cloud deployments of existing infrastructure. Is Oracle targeting cloud service providers or end-user companies who are interested in moving to the cloud?

A: Oracle WebLogic Server 12c is part of the Oracle Cloud Application Foundation (CAF). Oracle CAF brings together the benefits of the software infrastructure, including Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle Tuxedo. With a highly optimized engineered system, leveraging software across the range of Oracle cloud offering, WebLogic Server 12c delivers both extremely high performance and easy management in an open, standards-based cloud environment.

Most of Oracle’s direct sales efforts for WebLogic Server 12c focus on end-user companies, although cloud service providers are still an important section of our customers. On the product development side, we are kicking off a programme for companies wanting to quickly upgrade to Oracle WebLogic Server 12c. We will be selecting 100 customers and sending an Oracle product engineer to work together with each of these customers to better understand their requirements and the challenges they face as they move to WebLogic Server 12c, and in some cases as they move to a cloud infrastructure model. This will help us gain valuable insight into how our customers are building, deploying and operating systems today.

Q: Oracle is clearly demonstrating the value of its technology stack with the WebLogic Server 12c that improves integration with Oracle RAC and offers disaster recovery capabilities through Active Data Guard. Is Oracle going after the open source users of Java EE?

A: Oracle has the most popular open source server – the GlassFish Application Server with over 40 million downloads (as of October 2011). And Gartner has rated Oracle WebLogic as the No.1 application server worldwide, with a market share of 43.4%. In other words, Oracle has very successfully grown both the open source and the commercial aspects of its application server business.

Enhanced with transformational platforms and technologies such as Java EE 6, Oracle Active GridLink for RAC, Oracle Traffic Director, and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, Oracle WebLogic Server 12c differentiates itself from competitors, who do not offer any of these capabilities today.

For example, with the improved disaster recovery capabilities that leverage proven capabilities such as Oracle Active Data Guard, customers can deploy WebLogic 12c in a continuously-available manner across multiple data centres — and this feature is unique to Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.

With over 10,000 Oracle RAC customers, WebLogic 12c’s easy integration with RAC is able to both dramatically improve performance and significantly reduce database load – making it a very “green” solution. Moreover, these advanced features — both the disaster recovery capability and the Oracle RAC optimizations — pay for themselves quickly and significantly reduce operational complexity.

3. The enhancements in WebLogic Server 12c are touted to speed up application development and reduce time to market. Can you give an example on how that might be the case for say, a company that’s building an e-commerce shopfront application using Java?

A: Oracle has made the software easy for developers to download and get started. The process is dramatically simplified – download, unzip, run. In addition to chopping the download size in half and simplifying installation, WebLogic Server 12c offers several significant enhanced features and capabilities that help accelerate the development cycle.

Added Capabilities
Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) 7 provides added support and new capabilities. Developers can now leverage Java SE 7 to create cleaner, more maintainable code.

Oracle now has a fully compliant Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 server available in a 165Mb download, that focuses on ease of development. Java EE 6 provides a light-weight programming model with support for Contexts and Dependency injection (CDI), Annotations, POJO based development and more – all in an extensible and standards based Java EE platform.

Added Tooling Support
In addition to IDE support in NetBeans, JDeveloper and Eclipse, WebLogic 12c fully integrates with a common set of development tools like Maven, Hudson, Ant & JUnit, making it easier for developers who can be immediately productive with a common build, test and release environment.

As mobile applications are clearly an area of investment for most enterprises, WebLogic 12c makes it very easy to expose business application and data as RESTful or Web Services in a secure manner on the server side.

Multiple Platforms
Oracle also introduced ADF Mobile which allows developers to rapidly develop applications that can be deployed across different mobile device platforms such as iOS and Android, and is heavily investing in HTML 5 and Web Sockets, which has broad industry backing and is also being standardised in Java EE.

All these benefits and features will make application development so much easier; help to improve speed and improve the overall user experience.

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises:

Oracle Public Cloud
Aimed squarely at the Salesforce crowd, the Oracle Public Cloud provides access to Oracle Fusion Applications including customer relationship management and human capital management, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, on the cloud.

To top it off, Oracle Public Cloud comes with the Oracle Social Network that allows workers to receive real-time information feeds and collaborate with one another. Users will have access to a range of collaboration tools, including profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing, instant messaging and web conferencing.

Oracle is also making it easy for companies to move existing applications that currently reside in their own datacenters to the cloud. Existing Java-based applications and the Oracle Database can be deployed onto Oracle Public Cloud without code changes, allowing companies to take advantage of existing IT assets and skills. Pricing for Oracle Public Cloud will be based on a monthly subscription. Each hosted application can be purchased independently of others.

What this means
If you intend to move your Oracle apps and other Java-based applications to the cloud, the Oracle Public Cloud will be the smoothest path to take. While the Salesforce cloud supports Java through Heroku, a cloud application platform acquired by Salesforce last year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed that Heroku does not run J2EE apps. For an explanation of what Heroku supports (or not), check out this blog post by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins.

In any case, the Oracle cloud still provides a quick way to test-drive new apps and services on the cloud before deploying them in-house, if you are operating on the on-premise deployment model. Companies that are planning to extend access to their existing applications to new office locations can also tap on the Oracle cloud without incurring new hardware costs.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance
This appliance, which combines x86 processors with high-capacity disks that offer up to 432 terabytes of storage, will help companies manage the growing pool of big data, or unstructured data, from e-mail systems, sensors, smart meters and social networks. These data sets are so huge that they cannot be stored and analyzed with standard database management tools. Companies, however, are increasingly seeing the need to make sense of these vast amounts of data to improve business decision making.

What’s in the box: Oracle NoSQL Database, a distributed database for managing massive quantities of data and coping with changing data formats; an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, a Java framework for processing and querying vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity hardware; Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop that simplifies creation of data processing jobs on Hadoop; Oracle Loader for Hadoop to load datasets from the Hadoop environment into Oracle Database 11g; and the open source distribution of R, a free software environment for statistical computing.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is integrated with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine. Oracle says this integration will let companies organize and analyse all their structured and unstructured data together.

What this means
Oracle did not say when the appliance would be ready. Moreover, running Hadoop – which is meant to work on massively distributed commodity hardware – on a single appliance does not make sense. More details on the benefits of such an implementation will need to be articulated before comparing Oracle’s appliance with similar offerings from Teradata, IBM and EMC.

Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine
Following the introduction of the Exadata database machine and the Exalogic middleware and application server, Oracle took the wraps off Exalytics, which is touted as the industry’s first in-memory hardware plus software system. The machine comprises Oracle’s Sun Fire server with 1 terabyte of RAM, the Intel Xeon E7-4800 processor with 40 cores, Oracle BI Foundation software including Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase, and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics.

What this means
Instead of asking customers to buy yet another “Exa” box, Oracle could have baked the BI capabilities into Exadata, as opposed to moving data from Exadata into Exalytics. The reason for doing this is unclear, though it may be that Oracle Essbase (which can’t do calculations on the fly) and TimesTen can’t operate efficiently in Oracle’s database architecture. Sure, Oracle makes money selling boxes but enterprises would surely think twice about getting another piece of hardware when IT consolidation remains top on the priority list of CIOs.

In a statement today, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Oracle cancelled his Wednesday morning address (U.S. time) at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 held in San Franciso’s Moscone Center. Instead, Benioff will organize a separate session at a nearby restaurant.

“Oracle just cancelled my keynote tomorrow. But the show must go on! Everyone is welcome to join me at Ame Restaurant tomorrow to hear about the social enterprise. Sorry Larry, the cloud can’t be stopped,” said Benioff, who worked at Oracle for 13 years before he started Salesforce.com in 1999.

Oracle told the New York Times that the changes were made because of “overwhelming attendance” at Oracle OpenWorld. The session was moved to Thursday at 8am in the Novellus Theatre. Benioff, however, said he would be unable to make it for the new slot due to travel plans.

Moreover, the turnout for Thursday morning sessions at the Oracle event is normally poor, as show delegates would still be recovering from the customer appreciation party the night before.

Salesforce and Oracle compete on business software that lets companies manage their sales operations, contact centers and other business processes. While Salesforce runs its products off the cloud, Oracle offers enterprise software that can housed on-premise in corporate data centers or on the cloud.

Salesforce concluded its own Dreamforce conference just about a month ago. With about 30,000 attendees out of 45,000 registered participants, the event has been growing in scale thanks to heightened interest in cloud computing in recent years.

The subject of almost every Oracle Openworld event for the last few years, Fusion Applications is built from the ground-up and represents a major engineering feat for the enterprise software giant.

According to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the company spent “a lot of time” rewriting applications with features taken from its own Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Built with a service-oriented architecture in mind, Fusion Applications and its underlying Web services components can connect with other applications to pass on data that traverse a gamut of business processes. The software components are all built with Java and can run on industry standard Java middleware.

According to Oracle, Fusion Applications spans several product categories including Customer Relationship Management, Human Capital Management, Financials, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Supply Chain Management, Procurement and Project Portfolio Management.

Customers can acquire each product in its entirety or choose from over 100 Web services components.

“Fusion pieces can integrate with what you’re using today,” Ellison said, adding that businesses will not need to rip and replace their existing business software.

Embedding business intelligence into Fusion Applications is a key design principle that Oracle has undertaken. Unlike competing products which view analytics separately from business applications, Ellison said, Fusion Applications will give business users the information they need to make better decisions.

For instance, a manager will know if he or she will exceed the departmental budget once a purchase is approved. In other scenarios, you can also determine the best supplier for a particular product with the help of a scoring module that takes you through the decision making process.

With analytics built right into Fusion Applications, ERP software is no longer just a process automation tool. “Process automation is still important, but you get better pay-offs with more (analytics) information,” Ellison noted.

Fusion Applications can also be installed on-premise behind a company’s firewall or rolled out as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering.

This means a company can choose to adopt a hybrid approach where CRM software, for instance, can be deployed on-premise at manufacturing facilities and on the cloud for its sales office locations.

The business software, which also includes social networking and collaboration features, will be shipping later this year, with general availability by the first quarter of 2011.

Those concerns were laid to rest on Monday by a top Oracle executive who shared the Java roadmap with JavaOne attendees on the sidelines of Oracle Openworld.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice-president for product development, said: “I’ve been at JavaOne since 1997, but this year is very special for us because it is the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving.”

Oracle will unveil JDK 7 in 2011, with JDK 8 coming a year later, Kurian revealed. He also assured developers that Oracle is committed to delivering the best Java Virtual Machine as well as OpenJDK, the open source implementation of the Java programming language.

Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle, told developers at a JavaOne general technical session Tuesday that the enhancements in the new JDKs are centered around productivity, performance, universality, modularity, integration, and serviceability of the Java platform.

For example, in Project Coin, small changes to Java’s syntax that help to reduce redundant codes are proposed, while Project Jigsaw aims to modularize Java by eliminating classpaths and describing library dependencies with a module path and the command jpkg.

JAR files can be built by jpkg, but other formats such as jmod, rpm and deb can be created as well. This allows users to install Java programs easily through standard package managers, Reinhold said.

Reinhold added that to meet the 2011 deadline for JDK 7, Project Jigsaw and Project Lambda – which proposes to add first-class functions, function types, and lambda expressions (informally, “closures”) to Java – will only be available in JDK 8 slated for a late 2012 release.

Kurian also detailed plans to provide a common programming model based on JavaFX across all Java platforms, with interoperability between HTML 5, Java and JavaScript. JavaFX is used for developing rich Internet applications such as video streaming.

“We’re going to give you a single programming model based on JavaFX that spans both (native Java and browser) domains,” he said.

Kurian also outlined efforts to jazz up Java apps with eye candy using a new graphics engine based on the Prism graphics stack that delivers 2D/3D vector graphics and high-quality media. In addition, developers can use JavaFX’s Swing programming routines in Prism to create snazzy user interfaces.

Future Java developments will continue to be guided by simplicity to ensure the programming language will be understood by another developer in the same organization, Reinhold said.

“Simplicity matters, things need to be understandable and a clear semantic model is essential,” he explained.

“Java tries very hard to be the same language everywhere, so as we evolve the language we’ll do it cautiously with a long term view,” he added. “We will add a few selected features periodically and I think going forward we’ll see relatively more features over the next few years than you’ve seen in the past.”

To date, Oracle Linux, which has claimed 5,000 customers, is built on the Red Hat Compatible Kernel that allows customers to continue running Red Hat applications.

In his keynote address Sunday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison highlighted key issues the company faced with retaining full compatibility with Red Hat.

“Oracle spends a lot of time finding bugs in Red Hat Linux and fixing them. However, when we find the bugs, Red Hat has been very slow in incorporating those bugs into their software,” he said.

Ellison also noted that Red Hat has also been slow to take up enhancements contributed by the community.

“They currently run a four year old version of Linux and that’s a huge problem for us because we build high-end Exalogic and Exadata machines that run Linux. We can’t afford to be four years behind in software,” he said.

Oracle Linux’s Red Hat compatible kernel, however, will still be available to customers, in addition to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel that’s derived from the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel.

With the new development, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel will continue to track the mainline Linux kernel and users will benefit from Oracle innovation and community enhancements at a much faster rate, Ellison said.

Oracle has also packed in several enhancements in the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel including data integrity extensions that stop corrupt data from being written to storage plus hardware fault management for improved application uptime.

Existing Oracle Linux and RHEL 5 users can upgrade to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel with no reinstallation of the OS. Third-party apps that run on RHEL 5 should run unchanged on Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel with greater performance and reliability, Oracle said.

Targeted at large companies who wish to build their own “private clouds“, Exalogic is touted as a “compute cloud-in-a-box” product that includes a combination of servers, storage and networking components melded into a single machine.

“It includes all the hardware you need to run your applications, including 30 servers, infiniband networking that lets servers talk to one another and a high availability storage device,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the show’s opening keynote today. “It also has all the middleware you need to develop and run all your applications.”

Essentially, what Oracle has done is to make it easier for enterprises to set up virtualised data centres where IT resources can be dynamically deployed based on business needs with the help of virtualization technology. Oracle is employing Java VM in Exalogic, where applications can run on Linux or Solaris virtual machines.

The usual cloud computing characteristics apply to Exalogic: dynamic load balancing, failover using Oracle Coherence and the ability to add, remove or migrate virtual machines on the fly.

Like most private cloud offerings, Exalogic is built as a modular system which uses the same hardware and software configuration regardless of use cases and operating environments. Ellison says such standardization allows Oracle to discover and roll out patches quickly. In addition, Oracle claims it can deliver all Exalogic patches for various components in a single file.

The Exalogic looks promising, with its high performance (over 1 million HTTP requests per second), scalability and low CPU overhead of between two to four per cent. Besides IBM, Oracle is perhaps the only vendor that owns all the pieces in a private cloud offering.

Others like Cisco, EMC and VMware are relying on alliances such as the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to address this market segment. This approach opens customers to uncertainty over the possibility of future mergers and acquisitions, or the chance of a fallout among partners.

With Exalogic, Ellison is aligning Oracle’s definition of cloud computing with that of Amazon Web Services which offers the EC2 platform for running or developing applications, as opposed to SaaS players such as Salesforce.com, which offers access to applications running off the Internet.

Ellison said in the case of Amazon EC2, technology is virtualised, faults are isolated and protected, and resources are consumed on a pay-per-use basis. “That’s what gave rise to the term cloud computing – it is a platform for building applications, it’s elastic, it’s virtual and you pay for what you use.”

For Salesforce.com, applications are not virtualised or fault tolerant and companies are charged based on the number of users they have, Ellison added.

“It’s really just one or two applications on the Internet. They do have a proprietary platform that lets you do little add-ons and interfaces to Salesforce applications, but it’s not elastic.

“If demand increases in the Amazon compute cloud, you get more VMs and servers. If demand increases on Salesforce.com, you better reduce demand. If someone is generating too many reports and using too much resources, they’ll kill the reports because they don’t want to hurt the performance of other customers,” Ellison said.

“Our idea of cloud computing is identical to (Amazon’s). We believe it’s a platform and on that platform you run a wide variety of software – databases, development tools, guest operating systems, virtual machines. It’s a comprehensive development and execution environment that can virtually run all your applications. It must be virtualized, it must be elastic and it clearly includes hardware and software.

But we have a slightly different take from Amazon – we believe that not only could these clouds be publicly available to customers, individual customers can also build their own private cloud behind their firewalls.”

Interestingly, Ellison hinted at the possibility of Fusion applications being hosted on Oracle’s public cloud that’s run by a new cloud services division headed by former IBM cloud executive Joanne Olsen.

Fusion applications, the next generation business applications coded from the ground-up from Oracle’s various acquisitions in the past, will finally be available to customers by year-end.

Will Oracle then apply the cloud computing moniker to these SaaS-enabled Fusion applications?

In 2007, Oracle filed a lawsuit against TomorrowNow, a now defunct SAP subsidiary that offered maintenance and support services for Oracle software at a much lower cost than that provided by Oracle. SAP had said then that it will aggressively defend the claims made in the lawsuit.

On Thursday, SAP said that it will accept financial responsibility for any judgment awarded against TomorrowNow, despite the fact that SAP was not involved in TomorrowNow’s service operations and did not engage in any of the copying or downloading alleged in Oracle’s complaint.

Importantly, SAP said it will continue to present arguments and evidence demonstrating that Oracle’s damages claims in this matter are vastly overstated.

“By accepting responsibility for TomorrowNow’s actions, SAP is taking a decisive move to focus the issues in the case. We acknowledged three years ago that TomorrowNow made mistakes, and we took direct action to address Oracle’s concerns, including shutting down the company nearly two years ago,” said SAP CFO Werner Brandt.

“SAP is committed to compensating Oracle for the harm the limited operations of TomorrowNow actually caused. Oracle’s unreasonable damages claims are an unproductive distraction as we work to find a fair resolution in this case.”

Enterprise software vendors derive a large part of their revenues from maintenance and support services, so isn’t surprising that Oracle is sparing no effort to protect its cash cow.

The software giant also filed a similar suit against Rimini Street, another third-party support vendor which supports both SAP and Oracle applications.

The market for third-party software support is a viable one, especially since most enterprise apps rarely require frequent maintenance and upgrades. The outcomes of these two lawsuits would determine if this market will flourish in future. Systems integrators who have been keen to enter the market but are wary of jeopardizing their relationships with software makers will be watching this space.