The Future is Colorful - Database Roundtable with IBM and Oracle

This article is available for download in English, Spanish Chinese and Japanese at the bottom of the page. (Free of charge)

Worldwide, the diversity and strength of the SAP community is unique. The mix of stringent business and organizational knowledge with a wide variety of IT architecture models has made SAP solutions successful.

The SAP user always had a choice in terms of infrastructure, operating systems, storage, databases and middleware. These degrees of freedom promoted competition and always enabled custom-fit solutions.

SAP Business Suite on AnyDB - Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase or Hana - is the reference model for standard business software.

And hardly anyone wants to change this - except SAP itself. Even SAP's existing customers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, organized in the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG e.V.), largely stick to the classic model, as a survey 18 months ago revealed.

DSAG Board Chairman Marco Lenck has this to say:

"DSAG members have built up a great deal of expertise in the area of Business Suite and trust it to map their processes efficiently and as completely as possible, both today and in the future. Despite innovative products, the future security of the Business Suite must remain,"

Due to SAP's well-known plans to introduce a monoculture based on S/4 and Hana by 2025, justified concerns are arising in the SAP community.

E-3 Magazine invited IBM and Oracle to a database roundtable in the editorial office in Munich. Martin Mezger, SAP Business Development Executive - IBM Analytics, and Gerhard Kuppler, Vice President SAP Alliances, Oracle Corporation, discussed with Editor-in-Chief Peter M. Färbinger.

What options and what strategy will SAP's existing customers have in the coming years? Because a Hana symposium organized by DSAG e.V. shows a disastrous state of the current development of SAP's in-memory computing database Hana.

With monthly updates and bug fixes they try to cope with the situation, but existing customers are completely overwhelmed due to the faulty Hana software code.

Alternatives to S/4 and Hana are thus being discussed intensively - also at the E-3 Database Roundtable:

Mr. Gerhard Kuppler, the database partnership with SAP has now lasted for almost 30 years. What does that mean for Oracle and for SAP's existing customers?

Gerhard Kuppler, Oracle: First, it is our intention to continue to deliver best-in-class technology to the tens of thousands of SAP-on-Oracle database customers.

Our joint work has always been characterized by a constant desire to provide joint customers with efficient service and support solutions for their application needs. And that is to provide customers with added value and optimal protection of their investments.

Second, the ongoing collaboration aims to provide optimized database technologies for mission-critical application environments that make the use of SAP more secure, reliable, highly scalable, and ready for the cloud.

And third, SAP benefits from a very successful service and support partnership with Oracle Corporation - with this primarily benefiting joint customers.

The Oracle teams in Walldorf and St. Leon-Rot, which work closely with the SAP colleagues in Support, Development and the Alliance Team, are well-rehearsed team players, so to speak.

In summary, what does this mean for the SAP community?

Coupler: Oracle is one of the key infrastructure technology partners that played a major role in the development and success of SAP R/3.

SAP began R/3 development in 1988. Oracle's database technologies and SAP's applications are very closely linked and optimally coordinated.

We have managed to establish our Oracle database technologies as the number one database among SAP customers around the globe. The very large common customer base expects a cost advantage from our two companies; in other words, technologies that work together first-class over the long term.

Oracle Corporation deploys a significant amount of support resources at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, and in St. Leon-Rot, Palo Alto, and Tokyo to ensure secure, reliable, and scalable database usage.

Mr. Martin Mezger, IBM's database partnership with SAP is only slightly shorter in the R/3 environment, and of course even longer in the R/2 environment - how do you assess this time for IBM customers?

Martin Mezger, IBM: We have consistently focused our partnership, which has grown over many decades, on customer benefits. Even after SAP was founded by former IBM employees, the SAP product R/2 was designed to run on mainframes, including DB2.

In the case of the successor products R/3 and SAP Business Suite, a great deal was invested in joint development, especially in the database environment, also in order to optimize DB2 for use with SAP software.

I can confirm: This is continuing. With our current investments in DB2 development, we have the future of SAP customers in mind. Of course, every partnership has its ups and downs, and our customers should not be put off by them.

With Hana as a database and especially with S/4, SAP has effectively declared its own solutions an AnyDB-free zone. How does a long-time close SAP companion like IBM and Oracle deal with this?

Mezger: We believe that focusing on a proprietary strategy is wrong in the long term. We have already understood that at IBM. SAP has had a good sense of competition and the advantages it gives SAP customers. There was a partner ecosystem with which immense value was created together.

Is that still the case now? In the meantime, SAP is talking about partners, treating them predominantly as "routes-to-market".

After all, SAP is an important partner for IBM, not only in the database market?

Mezger: As far as DB2 is concerned, we stand by our customers: We are always ready to cooperate with SAP in broad areas, and our investments are focused on these new fields, also because the cooperations with other ERP vendors benefit just as much from the new investments in DB2.

Coupler: More than two-thirds of midsize and high-end SAP customers run their SAP application on Oracle and trust Oracle technologies. Thus, Oracle databases are effectively "set" in the SAP environment.

Both corporations - Oracle Corporation and SAP - logically have a shared responsibility to SAP's overwhelming customer base, which relies on Oracle database technologies.

And don't you have to look beyond SAP's borders?

Coupler: Yes, practically all SAP customers use completely different non-SAP applications. This means that even if an SAP customer migrates its business warehouse to Hana, for example, it still uses Oracle databases to run other applications.

In addition, Oracle has a very wide spread with other applications in just these and other markets.

And what about market share?

Coupler: With the market entry of Hana, also in connection with the Sybase acquisition, SAP issued the goal of becoming number two in the global database market.

That was several years ago now. Market surveys by Gartner on the global database market show that SAP is still very far from scoring points with Hana in the database market beyond the SAP market.

The fact is: Oracle is proven to still be the undisputed leader in the global database market. Hana is an SAP-proprietary environment and customers want openness.

Mezger: I think it's just as important to think about the vast majority of existing SAP customers. In other words, the customers who have Business Suite in use and want to participate in technological progress without risking the destruction of man-years of consulting services in their local systems.

I'm thinking here of the large-scale customizations that SAP customers have to make to their systems to get customized functionality for their individual business model.

We have done a lot in this area, like with DB2 BLU in the SAP BW environment, which is our in-memory technology.

With our new HTAP strategy, Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing, we still have a lot to do. We are focusing on the hybrid database that can handle both transactional and analytical workloads equally well - i.e. DB2 with HTAP.

This is part of our roadmap and is our approach for customers who want to run more complex analytical queries directly on their business suite.

We believe there are benefits to customers using HTAP to accelerate their business suite, which has been customized for many years to meet their specific business needs. And without radical changes to the system architecture.

In terms of marketing and sales, SAP has been leading its existing customers in the direction of Hana or Hana-based systems such as S/4 for some time now. The Walldorf-based software group emphasizes the successes that have been achieved. What is the perception of Oracle among SAP's existing customers?

Coupler: Which of the many Hana is meant? SAP NetWeaver BW or SAP BW/4 Hana, Business Suite on Hana or S/4 Hana?

SAP customers are unsettled! They don't know at the moment where the journey is going. Decades have been invested in Oracle, Microsoft or IBM database technologies - and now there is to be only one database in the future?

Customer projects are delayed and often - not least due to the strong pressure created by SAP sales - Hana is "successfully" sold to the customer, but neither put into production nor established in the planning framework for the near future.

SAP has always been an open technology, which is now being "closed", so to speak, by Hana and especially by S/4 - so-called vendor lock-in.

Mezger: We see the usual market picture: On the one hand, there are the customers who want to try something different, and there are very many customers who are focused on their own business and expect their IT partners to align themselves accordingly.

After all, maintenance payments also give customers a direct claim to innovation in the existing product. At least that's how we see it with DB2.

This attitude gives rise to the DB2 roadmap and the willingness to provide the DB2 world with immediately usable innovations at regular intervals.

One example of this is the very high availability provided by DB2 pureScale systems for 24/7 data availability, which is even easier to use in the SAP environment with DB2 V11.1. And that without any cost explosion.

And what about innovations among users themselves?

Mezger: This point is just as important to me. The sales-driven approach of SAP that you mentioned leads far too often to quite simply missing the point.

How should I orient myself as a medium-sized customer or DAX or Swiss Market Index group decision-maker if I want to make my business fit for the future?

This is about an innovation agenda that is much more about cognitive systems, the Internet of Things, new agile dev- ops-driven software projects, mobile devices, and so on.

IBM is already supplying industry with Watson solutions, with Watson IoT, with IBM Bluemix - in the cloud but also on premise. Or currently with new IBM products and projects in the field of machine learning.

All of these topics enable a whole new level of agility for our customers.

We see: Concentrating only on one product may work in other markets, but in our German-speaking and other highly developed markets you won't be heard...

SAP user associations such as DSAG have repeatedly called for S/4 to be made available for other databases as well; so that existing customers are able to protect their investments in Oracle and IBM technologies, for example. What is the state of play?

Mezger: In my opinion, SAP has probably moved ahead very quickly in this area. And has not yet taken the opportunity to involve its database partners.

However, competition still counts as a direct metric when it comes to innovation. IBM as a database vendor actively faces this competition and DB2 performance can be publicly verified by DB2 benchmarks.

At SAP, you can choose from a wide range of database offerings, as long as they're just called Hana. No one should like that. In the absence of competition, SAP customers and ultimately consumers are the ones who suffer.

That's why I say customer and stakeholder associations play an essential role in influencing product strategies. User associations must actively reflect their needs and use their weight as market players, otherwise they have failed in their role.

With DB2, this influence works very well. We have a vital DB2 community, especially in the German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG). We are very grateful to our customers for this!

Coupler: Over time, SAP user groups around the world have obviously emancipated themselves. Gradually, more critical tones became audible in the community, which obviously resonated with the SAP Executive Board.

My guess is that the tenor of DSAG in Germany and especially ASUG in the US will continue to blow the same horn, which is: S/4 AnyDB!

When Hana and S/4 were launched, existing customers were more or less presented with a fait accompli. The market will decide the future of the "new" SAP technologies.

If the transformation speed from AnyDB to Hana or S/4 continues at the same pace as before, I expect the SAP NetWeaver stack to be de-supported after 2030.

With the Oracle 12c database, Oracle also provides in-memory functionality like Hana. How do existing SAP Oracle customers take this option?

Coupler: Oracle Database In-memory has proven itself many times over. In a benchmark - not certified by SAP - this option has proven to outperform the values achieved with Hana.

In addition, the SAP customer who uses Oracle Database In-memory saves expensive new hardware, time-consuming migrations and the second database license.

In the non-SAP environment, Oracle In-memory is used very often and for a long time to the great satisfaction of customers - of course also by SAP customers, see the customer presentations at the DSAG Technology Days in Mannheim this year and at Asug/Sapphire Orlando in May 2016.

From our experience, we know that SAP customers have made thousands of modifications to the SAP NetWeaver stack. These are now running high performance with Oracle Database In-memory - without a single code change - on OLTP and BW.

Back in 2013, IBM introduced DB2 Blu, a column-oriented version of its database. How was this technology received in the SAP market?

Mezger: The DB2 Blu-In-memory technology was indeed very quickly and widely adopted by the market, as we focused on immediate use in existing SAP applications.

Blu is already part of the DB2 AESE license, therefore very many DB2 customers are now using Blu in-memory technology without any further licensing and maintenance costs.

We receive a lot of positive feedback and are actively investing in the further development of the technology as part of our DB2 roadmap, also with regard to SAP Core Data Services.

And the license costs?

Mezger: From my perspective, licensing costs are only part of the total cost, so our goal is to protect customer investments and enable innovation with the least amount of resources.

We try to minimize additional efforts for SAP system operation with DB2, existing hardware can mostly be reused. The customer has the choice to use the Blu-In-memory technology on Windows, Linux or AIX.

We also offer similar possibilities with DB2 zOS on mainframes. Our customers confirm accelerations of a factor of 55 for SAP BW queries and high space savings through efficient compression of an additional 63 percent on already compressed data at attractive licensing and operating costs.

That's the benefit of open competition, and that's my call to the community: Compare!

SAP has named the deadline for the SAP NetWeaver-based Business Suite with the use of AnyDBs. According to this, the suite on AnyDB will no longer be supported after 2025. What will happen by then, what can customers do in your opinion?

Coupler: SAP has set a certain mark with the de-support date. As already stated: The market will decide whether the 2025 targets are achieved or not.

If the conversion rate from AnyDBs to Hana or S/4 does not accelerate sustainably, a much later date can be assumed.

What are your plans?

Coupler: Oracle will definitely support SAP Business Suite or SAP BW for as long as SAP intends to do so. Oracle can confirm that SAP will also be able to support the Oracle database for SAP customers until 2025 and beyond.

SAP wanted to create various application unique selling points with Hana, i.e. functionalities that exclusively benefit Hana users. The fact is that SAP customers also wanted to have these functionalities in the "non-Hana environment".

And what happened? Core Data Services and Hana-SAP-BW optimized InfoCubes - also called FlatCubes at Oracle - can be used in combination with Oracle Database In Memory Option, see SAP Note 2335159

Mezger: In my view, customers or their needs will determine when they stop using their Business Suite. We see 2025 as a "statement of direction" and are of course prepared to support our DB2 customers for as long as they wish.

Even for customers who no longer want to use business suite systems, access to legacy data will be necessary in response to auditor requirements. Here, too, we offer flexible licensing models to meet these requirements.

A large proportion of SAP customers use Oracle solutions such as the Database, the Exadata Database Machine or Oracle SuperCluster both for SAP and for many non-SAP applications. How is the coexistence regulated, the use of Oracle Database and Hana, for example?

Coupler: Many customers use both - Oracle Database on Exadata in the ECC environment as well as SAP BW with Hana. One and the same customer is both a reference speaker at Oracle OpenWorld with Oracle Exadata and 12c for their SAP system and for Hana with SAP BW at Sapphire in Orlando, USA.

SAP customers running both ECC and BW with Hana are very, very rare and present themselves as a kind of "white raven". You are very welcome to find more information here: www.oracle.com/sap

Mr. Kuppler, thank you very much for the interview. Mr. Mezger, at IBM there is still the possibility of an interplay between IBM Power and DB2. How do you see the prospects here?

Mezger: Among the major Unix vendors, IBM Power is our house brand. Our "Co-Innovation Roadmap" with IBM Power is full to bursting. This roadmap contains future topics, I think of blockchain as an important future topic.

Here, business transactions are being redefined on a digital level and IBM Blockchain will also find its way into SAP customers. It goes without saying that we maintain close cooperation between the IBM divisions.

Our developers at IBM's Research and Development Center in Böblingen have been instrumental in influencing the Power8 instruction set for SAP DB2, and our AIX customers have long appreciated this.

One example of this is the accelerated hardware-supported NX842 compression of backup and log files by Power8 processors. In internal tests, NX842 compression was the most resource-efficient and fastest variant for SAP backups.

The compression rate and thus space saving was 40 percent. In the future, compression and encryption technologies will become increasingly important, and this deep integration already exists there. This makes our systems more secure.

What's more, IBM Power's PowerVM virtualization technology makes it particularly well suited to the private cloud strategy that IBM Analytics is pursuing.

In the long term, we want to offer our customers exactly the same advantages in their own data center that they already know from the public cloud.

Finally, a special topic, but one that is currently very much on the minds of the SAP community: The pitfalls of SAP licensing - indirect usage costs?

Those who do not have an overview of which data is exchanged between SAP and non-SAP systems can experience nasty surprises. Indirect use in particular can result in high relicensing costs.

So in addition to SAP's licensing metrics, users should primarily have their own systems under control, right?

Mezger: I firmly believe that customers should prioritize the licensing of their systems. In interaction with SAP systems, this becomes a full-time job and part of the knowledge base of every IT end-user.

This means that you have to "watch out" for every license change, no matter how small. We want to show possibilities for licensing models here so that data is released from systems and not held in silos by artificial restrictions. Because in the long term, data will flow into Hadoop architectures and into open Apache Spark systems.

One thing will be clear in the future: The new professions that prevail there, such as Data Scientists and the Chief Data Officers, really no longer have any understanding of these silos. This is the feedback we got from the IBM Data Science Experience Community, DSX.

Mr. Mezger, thank you very much for the interview.