Oracle's Mark Hurd To SAP: Good Luck Stealing Our Customers

One of the oldest, most epic rivalries in the tech world is Oracle versus SAP.

Execs at both enterprise software companies like to trash talk and otherwise insult each other. SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner once mooned Larry Ellison's boat on the high seas. Ellison once said that SAP execs "must be on drugs." A SAP executive even wrote a humorous song poking fun at Oracle and released it on YouTube.

Now, Oracle co-president Mark Hurd offered a little smack talk of his own, saying in an interview that if HANA is the "most innovative" thing that SAP can do, "good luck to them."

He was referring to SAP's latest weapon against Oracle, an in-memory database called HANA, which can crunch enormous amounts of data almost instantly, far faster than a traditional Oracle database.

SAP is hoping its customers will yank out their Oracle databases and use HANA instead. SAP executives have called HANA 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."

While some people question how SAP derived such claims, there's no question that Oracle is watching SAP and HANA carefully.

On Friday, Oracle co-President Mark Hurd jumped in. He pshawed SAP and HANA in an interview with Computerworld's Chris Kanaracus. When asked about SAP's intention to grab database customers from Oracle with HANA, Hurd replied:

"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."