Watch this space....?
Well, Apothetic-ker wasn't on my list of potential CEOs (damn, that's another office sweepstake with no winner), but I suppose he makes sense when you consider;
1. hp is intent on building their software bizz, as being number 7 isn't good enough when hp always wants to be number 2 or number 1 in any market, so an enterprise software geezer isn't such a bad idea;
2. hp has always had a very close relationship with SAP and claim to be SAP's biggest partner, so this can only strengthen the SAP-hp relationship.
The anti-Oracle spat seems to be being a bit hyped, after all the majority of SAP implementations I have heard of on hp kit seem to have gone with Oracle as the DB and I've personally never had a problem working with SAP and Oracle in the same room. So far, SAP doesn't seem to have made many inroads into the installed Oracle base with Sybase as an alternative (or if they have then I've just not heard about it - anyone know any details on conversions?), so I can't see SAP going to full-on war with Oracle just yet.
I'm tempted to call Apothetic-ker a stand-in to keep the markets calm whilst the top-bods at hp (Livermore and Donatelli) manouvere for the next CEO fight.