SAP and Teradata announced Monday that they've teamed up to offer integrated hardware-software data warehouse systems.

The agreement will simplify integration issues for businesses that use both SAP and Teradata, but it also shows that neither vendor is sitting still as Oracle contemplates opportunities for hardware-software combos with its planned Sun Microsystems acquisition.

The SAP/Teradata deal calls for the companies to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on Teradata database, and to integrate NetWeaver BW, SAP Business Objects, and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, an existing software-hardware combo.

What this all means is that customers will be able to purchase SAP/Teradata warehouse systems that scale up to 1,024 Intel-based nodes, with data capacity ranging from less than 1 TB to up to 4 PB.

SAP NetWeaver BW also runs on Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Oracle databases, as well as its own less-popular SAP MaxDB. SAP says about half of its largest customers also use Teradata.

Oracle, meanwhile, is a competitor of both SAP and Teradata. In a recent conference call regarding the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun, CEO Larry Ellison said that "completely integrated systems should be even more popular and extremely profitable." Sun's Solaris OS already is closely tied to Oracle, running more Oracle databases than any other OS.

In their joint press release Monday, SAP and Teradata said, "Teradata is endorsing SAP as a strategic partner for analytics and BI solutions," and the partnership "also renews and expands" Teradata's role as a reseller for SAP Business Objects. The companies said they would "look to leverage their joint business intelligence solutions in non-SAP enterprise resource planning accounts."

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