And literally so it seems. Oracle and SAP need the arms of software developers to bulk up their development efforts. From Datamonitor,

Oracle Corp declared war on SAP AG at its post acquisition analyst conference last week when Larry Ellison said he "would love to get into a technology war with SAP."

Although SAP has not declared itself in the same terms, it is speeding up its own technology development plans. At its quarterly results web cast, SAP declared that it would be increasing its headcount by 3,000.

... The need for speed is of course due to Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft and its announcement of the Java and SOA-based Project Fusion. This is SAP's proposed applications architecture that aims to combine the best features of Oracle's own business applications with those of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards within a three-year timeline. This has intensified the "stack" race, whereby vendors are seeking to provide a complete application and infrastructure stack, encompassing applications, databases, application servers and middleware ...

In a prior post, I portrayed Oracle's journey with Project Fusion as a risky, untraditional, yet bold move. Well this war will require some smart folks to build and fight.

Steve Shu