I can't believe I'm getting down-voted just because I'm not bullish on ANN.
As I said, in my humble opinion (IMHO), (and educated opinion) NN don't really have a lot of practical use. So long as they have to be processed in parallel, SVM will always have the advantage that they can be computed sequentially, meaning they can process much faster and without the need for specialized hardware. SVMs and ANN are solving the same problem in machine learning, they're both methods used for classifying data. Just SVMs do it much faster and within more practical means.
As I said, in my humble opinion (IMHO), (and educated opinion) NN don't really have a lot of practical use. So long as they have to be processed in parallel, SVM will always have the advantage that they can be computed sequentially, meaning they can process much faster and without the need for specialized hardware. SVMs and ANN are solving the same problem in machine learning, they're both methods used for classifying data. Just SVMs do it much faster and within more practical means.