HP and Oracle stepped up their commitment to sell more HP Integrity servers
running Oracle software.
Oracle said that its E-Business Suite, improved by the company’s purchases
of PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems, will run on HP Integrity servers going
forward. Oracle’s Database, Application server and Enterprise Manager
already run on the Integrity machines.
The move is a response to customer demand to run everything of Oracle
software on a single environment, supported by the HP-UX 11i operating
system.
HP CEO Mark Hurd and Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced the upgraded
partnership in a webcast press conference today. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
joined the webcast via video from Oracle OpenWorld in Tokyo.
The news centered around HP’s Integrity servers, which are based on the
Itanium processor, a chip architecture rife with both controversy and
promise.
IBM, Dell and Sun shun it, while HP remains the chip’s top cheerleader,
perhaps with good reason: IDC expects the
Itanium market to grow to $6.6 billion by 2009.
To answer questions about HP’s commitment to Integrity and Itanium, Hurd
said HP is committed to invest $1 billion per year over the next five years
to research and development, software, hardware and services for Integrity.
“We’re banking on Intel’s commitment to Itanium,” Hurd said during the webcast.
Intel, in turn, is working feverishly to provide a dual-core version of
Itanium to put in new servers, code-named Montecito.
Despite several delays,
Otellini said during the webcast that Intel will launch the Montecito
dual-core version of Itanium later this year.
Hurd said HP will launch the SX2000 chipset later
this month to work with Montecito. The chipset will provide much better memory latency and up to 33
percent more performance for servers.
The company plans to use Montecito’s expected performance and capacity
increases to drive even more growth in its Integrity line, he said.
In other facets of the announcement, HP said it is also installing Oracle
Fusion Middleware into centers based in the U.S., Tokyo, India and France to
help customers plan and install service-oriented architectures (SOAs)
Oracle will also extend its licensing support to the partitioning
technologies of the HP Virtual Server Environment, where only the total
number of capped processors within the server is required to be licensed.
This builds on Oracle’s plan to
charge users on a processor factor of .50 for machines equipped with
multi-core chips from AMD and Intel.
