Oracle's plan to drag its legal fight against rival SAP's defunct TomorrowNow subsidiary through a second trial is not surprising, analysts said Tuesday.

SAP on Tuesday announced the first products based on its HANA in-memory database aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, including a new Edge edition of the software as well as HANA-powered analytics for the Business One ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite.

Oracle has chosen a new trial in its lawsuit against SAP for copyright infringement, rejecting the reduction of a jury verdict by about US$1 billion by a federal court in September last year.

Serious technical problems that have delayed the rollout of an upgrade to SAP's community portal are persisting, to the point where the company is no longer specifying a launch date.

SAP's US$3.4 billion purchase of cloud software vendor SuccessFactors has been delayed indefinitely while a U.S. regulatory body investigates the deal, an SAP spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

A second technology making a significant impact on solving Big Data problems is in-memory computing, which takes workloads that were traditionally resident on disk-based storage and moves them into main memory. This delivers a performance improvement many times above that which has been possible previously.

It is just on 10 years since Salesforce.com unveiled the first preview of its customisable online customer relationship management (CRM) software at the annual DEMO conference in California. DEMO had previously been the launch platform for ground-breaking technology such as Netscape Navigator, Sun’s Java and Adobe Acrobat, but attendees in February 2001 would have had little idea that they were witnessing something that would turn the world of customer management software — and enterprise software generally — on its head.

The massive explosion in data volumes collected by many organisations has brought with it an accompanying headache in terms of putting it to gainful use. Businesses increasingly need to make quick decisions, and pressure is mounting on IT departments to provide solutions that deliver quality data much faster than has been possible before. The days of trapping information in a data warehouse for retrospective analysis are fading in favour of event-driven systems that can provide data and enable decisions in real time.

Now that SAP's roughly $US6 billion acquisition of Sybase has gained clearance from European regulators, it may not be long before the deal is finalised. With that in mind, users and partners of the companies have much to consider during the next few months, analysts say.

The battle and competition in the enterprise software market between SAP and Oracle has fast become one of the hottest rivalries in high-tech. And while it might not have the pop-culture pizzazz of Red Sox-Yankees or Coke-Pepsi, the passion of the thousands of the combatants involved makes it no less fervent or important a battle.