When Larry Ellison throws down the gauntlet of transaction processing benchmarks and offers to pay “any company $10 million if [their] Oracle database application doesn't run at least twice as fast on SUN hardware as on IBM's fastest computer”, there is no doubt that a rivalry exists between the Red Army of Redwood City and the Blue Suits of Armonk. What began in the 1980’s as a contest at the database layer has progressed over the last quarter of a century ever upward through an increasingly complex software stack. Regardless of how different these two giants of the ICT industry may seem on the surface, the truth is that the real battle has always been about who runs the world’s enterprise level business applications. Next year is shaping up as the inflection point from which true supremacy in this arena will be decided.