27 April 2009 News

 

The database wars: SAP and Teradata partner

Dan Barnes, Istanbul

More news in the world of database providers - SAP and Teradata have partnered, in a move that will make NetWeaver fully integrated with Teradata.

Given Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems last week the move is an interesting one, giving SAP a solid database/data warehouse partner with a proven track record in financial services. In 2008 Teradata gained HSBC and UniCredit as customers. HSBC is using Teradata in its risk management practice and UniCredit across its CFO function across its regions.

Speaking at Teradata Universe in Istanbul, EMEA president for Teradata, Hermann Wimmer - referring to the purchase of Sun by Oracle in veiled terms - noted that Larry Ellison's comments about moving from being a component supplier to being a full system provider vindicated Teradata's business model. The data warehouse supplier saw a 4% rise in annual revenue in 2008, with a 9% growth in the final quarter of that year.

Stephan Rossius, SVP for the global ecosystem & partner group at SAP said: "In my 30 years experience in this field, it's very hard to bypass a leader. You are the leader in your area, we are the leader in our area so its very important that we team up. The first part of the detail as you have said is that NetWeaver 7.2 will be available on Teradata. The second is that you are now a global technology partner. The third part is that we have started to co-innovate, and this co-innovation is a crucial dimension as our two companies develop technology for our customers. You have been a long standing partner of SAP and this will continue and will advance. It is also a stronger integration of your partner system and our partner system to increase and enhance the solutions and services around us.

"If you take the service partners you have today - the traditional service practice and analytics service and practice - we will make sure they work closer together to create best practices, ease of use to really deliver benefits."

Wimmer pointed out that: "There is an overlap of our customer base of 80%," before jokingly asking Rossius how long SAP thought its other customers should continue to work with the "wrong databases".