Ellison: 'We can double Oracle's hardware biz' Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer and cofounder, ain't messing around with systems. In fact, he is playing doubles with tennis partner and now Oracle co-president, Mark Hurd. Ellison will handle the creation of so-called "engineered systems," which stack up Oracle hardware and software, and Hurd will peddle them …
It seems to me that Ellison and Hurd are going back to the past, namely the past when HP provided solid, tough, equipment and support was second to none. Since I lived those days (70's to early 90's) I can vouch for both qualities and it was why, given a choice, I would always use and recommend HP equipment as would my fellow engineers and technicians.
This actually makes sense as a strategy, especially if Oracle manages to reduce recurring costs (staff, power, etc.). Of course, a performance/price, TCO, and ROI analyses are always called for so we'll have to wait to see those numbers. Turning the whole hardware to level 7 layers into a commodity product, albeit an expensive product, is a pretty aggressive approach which should lead to better profit margins, lower price, or both. It'll be interesting to watch.
$1.5B.....pretty soon every Oracle customer will have Exadata in their pipeline whether it is a real opportunity or not.
Look at the references they provided for Exadata, most of them are V1 references. Where's the beef Larry. (I don't want to know)
Next earnings call someone better ask..."This question is for Safra, (since Larry does not give straight answers) how many Exadata racks have you sold?" I bet it is under 100. The reason Softchoice was 50/50 software/hardware is because Oracle is giving ZERO percent discount on the hardware and drastically discounting the software to try to compete. Just look at the list price and you can see how deep they had to go on the software.
There will always be customers that will look past poor performance/reliability/TCO to have one throat to choke. Unfortunately, with Oracle's huge prices increases from last year and the software audits and hardware maintenance changes the throat that is being choked is the customer. We are finally looking at DB2 after all these years of being in denial.
Allison
Oracle's support contracts are tantamount to extortion. No surprise those income numbers are strong in this report. We're pretty much done buying Orasun hardware for this reason. You can't even download a BIOS update without a f-ing support contract. I'm hearing the same from other EDU's.
Having just left this horrible company. I can only agree with all of these posts.
The Sun business is half the size of 3 years ago. Customers, partners, & staff are leaving in droves.
And from a h/w perspective, worst qtr in living memory. These guys are not living in reality.
1.5B pipe. Ask them how much will be closed this CY year.
You can build a nice new roof (Exadata 8-2) but it's no good if the walls are falling down faster than you can fix.
I would not wish this company on your worst enemy !
Dance with the devil and you end up with some nice lawyers to speak with every Qtr, year end.
Incredible !
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
