During Oracle`s Analysts Day in New York, company CEO Larry Ellison, in measured tones, warned SAP to watch its step with its strategic advances.

TomorrowNow, a third party service provider that offers maintenance support for PeopleSoft applications, was acquired by SAP in January. The intent is to lure PeopleSoft users away from Oracle, which acquired PeopleSoft on 12 December, by supporting users of current implementations as they migrate to MySAP ERP. "SAP has every right to provide support for PeopleSoft applications as long as they don`t violate our intellectual and contractual property rights," said Ellison. "That`s our intellectual property. They should be cautious."

With a dearth of new deals in the market, SAP and Oracle, along with Microsoft, are increasingly competing for entire technology stacks that align applications and middleware in the same architecture.