Was Oracle’s $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems a mistake? There were plenty of critics of the deal last year when Oracle first bid for the venerable Silicon Valley firm. And while the jury is still out, Oracle’s impressed many with its systems approach and pruning of Sun’s unprofitable product lines. But as a systems vendors, Oracle finds itself with new competitors including former close ally HP. CEO Larry Ellison said most high end servers are purchased to run specific software and that Oracle has an advantage in offering integrated systems that run Oracle’s database and other enterprise software faster than competitors. Datamation reports on Oracle’s plans to become a major force in the systems business.
So much for coopetition. After reporting strong earnings that trumped analyst’s expectation, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison gave former close ally Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) fair warning that he’s gunning for their business.
“Our goal is to be number one in high end systems for high end transaction processing and data warehousing,” Ellison said in a conference call with analysts following yesterday’s release of earnings for the second quarter. “We’re not interested in the low end, we’re after the high end, high margin part of the market. We think IBM (NYSE: IBM) is quite competitive, while HP’s servers are big, slow and offer little software value add.”
