SAP, the world's largest maker of business software, may license 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.

(Reporting by Christoph Steitz, Editing by Mark Potter)

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