SAP may licence HANA to Oracle

FRANKFURT, GERMANY: SAP, the world's largest maker of business software, may licence its HANA offering to main rival Oracle in the future, its co-chief executive told a German newspaper.

"That would be possible. The question is whether Oracle can imagine it," the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper quoted Bill McDermott in an interview published on Monday.

"But seriously, a technological platform is not a real platform if it were not open to partners and even competitors. Partners like Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu or Hewlett-Packard already work with our HANA technology. We are open to everything."

SAP's HANA offering allows companies to analyze business data quickly and has been a major performance driver in the fourth quarter of 2011.