This afternoon the President of Oracle, Charles Phillips, spoke on Oracle’s strategy for providing solutions that are Complete, Open and Integrated. With plans to wrap up the SUN acquisition, Oracle is clearly focusing on vertically integrating their products using SUN hardware.
Looking to the Apple model, Oracle sees the opportunity to leverage the SUN hardware and their software to improve the quality and performance of the end product. With the ability to tune the applications from the disk up through the database and middleware, Oracle believes they can build pre-integrated application appliances with exceptional performance.
The big announcement today was about the new SUN Exadata system with performance that exceeds IBM’s current TPC-C results. The challenge for Oracle will be navigating the existing partner relationships and convincing customers that this change in paradigm is worthwhile. With SUN in their arsenal, Oracle will have to continue to maintain relationships with IBM, HP, DELL and other hardware vendors.
In one session today Larry Ellison spent a lot of time being critical of IBM because of IBM’s attempts to take advantage of the uncertainty by SUN customers. Larry’s comments highlighted the problems that Oracle will be creating as they make SUN their preferred hardware platform and work to tune it to work best with their software. The old saying is that when you fix one problem, you often create another.
It will remain to be seen if Oracle’s strategy to build hardware/software appliances will be popular with customers. Clearly it will be a hard pill for the hardware vendors to swallow.