Submitted by “Oracle has pulled the rug out from under Intel’s Itanium processor by yanking support of its database, middleware, and application software on future Poulson and Kittson Itaniums. It looks as though Larry Ellison wants to take on IBM in microprocessors for data center systems, man to man, head to head. ‘I remember when we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business,” Oracle’s co-founder and CEO said opening up his keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner and conference on Sunday night, when he also announced the new Exalytics in-memory BI appliance. ‘I guess we didn’t get that memo,’ Ellison quipped, pointing out that Apple is doing a ‘pretty good job’ designing its own hardware and software and making it work well with its own services. And that Oracle is not only committed to making its server, storage, and networking business work, but having taken Sun’s hardware as a means of getting its hands on Solaris and Java, Oracle is actually enthusiastic about creating its own stack.”
O.r.a.c.L.E. is the living proof.
you missed the quote you have in the title ….
I just hope that both companies destroy each other! Can’t stand Oracle DBMS…
Oracle DBMS is more superior than other. MSSQL server is even worse than open source dbms (MySQL an PostgreSQL atleast they work great with linux), DB2 is OK. Oracle is definitely not the best company (probably one of the worst), but their are the best dbms.
Edited 2011-10-08 19:01 UTC
Complexity != Best
Superior at what?
Best at what?
Between Apple and IBM when it comes to H/W
IBM is firmly aimed at the Enterpise
Apple is far more Consumer oriented.
Ellison is bonkers (IMHO) to compare Oracle with either of them.
If he really wants to take on IBM then may I humbly suggest that he looks at the prices for the items in his pricebook.
Why is DB2 a lot cheaper than Oracle on a Solaris platform?
Why have they increased the annuial costs for Weblogic beyond all recognition. In this case, I know of one company who has ditched Weblogic and moved everything to WAS. Now they are looking at buying some Power 7 kit to replace their 4yr old Oracle (neew Sun Sparc kit) which has seen its maintennance costs rocket in the past year.
It is IBM’s 4th Quarter so the sales teams are doing some very tasty deals. Deals which if my boss is anything to go by, Oracle are a million miles away from matching.
So Mr Ellison, are you really putting your company on the line and betting it all when you go up against IBM? I would like to think that your stockholders might have something to say about that eh?
Personally, I think this is a load of hot air.
Ellison does not understand how much of his DBMS and other software related business comes from IBM.
IBM’s consulting services branch will support almost anything you throw at them. They aren’t pushing their own products just because there is still a huge divide between the services and software groups.
If GBS and SWG set their cultural differences aside and work for a common goal, Oracle is toast! And if the systems goup joins? HP’s server business will go down faster than they can find a new CEO…
There are lot of people not agreeing with this.
A company’s value is proven, by showing that it can charge a premium for its products.
Likewise, if a company need to lower the price, it proves that the company is not confident in its products.
Oracle is increasing prices – that is a sign of strength. And Oracle also shows vastly increased revenues.
IBM is lowering their prices – that is a sign of weakness. IBM is even doing some things for free, which smells desperation.
IBM POWER6 servers were several times faster than x86 servers, and they costed 5-10x more.
IBM POWER7 is ~10% faster than x86 in some benchmarks, and costs only 3x more:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4285/westmereex-intels-flagship-bench…
IBM POWER8 will maybe be slower than x86? Then IBM needs to cut prices even further. Cutting prices is a sign of weaknesses, it signals that no one wants the product.
There will come a time when x86 will catch up on POWER cpus, and x86 will be faster, and cheaper. IBM does only high margin business, and IBM kills off low margin business. There will be no money to make if IBM sells more expensive and slower POWER servers. Will IBM kill off POWER servers then? POWER servers is the main platform which AIX runs on. If POWER is killed, what shall AIX run on, then?
Coincidentally, IBM is planning to kill off AIX, sometime in the future. IBM have confirmed this officially:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2003/01/29/ibm-…
Maybe AIX will be killed, when POWER servers are low margin business?
Thus, IBM is showing sign of weakness, and Oracle is showing sign of strength. The new Oracle T4 servers holds several world records. For instance, the TPC-H database benchmarks shows that four T4 SPARC cpus are as fast as eight POWER7 cpus. But there are benchmarks where POWER7 is stronger. The trick is that Oracle can optimize the whole system, from software to hardware and make it run faster than another vendor who puts together different components without optimization. Oracle gives the best database performance today. And this is important to companies, which is why Oracle can increase the prices and still get new customers.
… IBM starts offering their database and WebSphere software for Sparc hardware? At a competitive price? Will Larry, Prince of Darkness, be willing to meet them on the cost battlefield?
<(^B)<
Edit: I see from a responder who hit Post before I did that this is already the case for IBM sofware. Then I will tag my comment with – <(^B)< <(^B)<
Edited 2011-10-07 16:31 UTC
That assumes that Oracle doesn’t find some “clever” way of making it hard or impossible for IBM to port their stuff to Sparc. Like Microsoft has done, where they make use of private APIs to give their own apps an advantage. Maybe in the current technical and legal environment, it would be impossible for Oracle to really lock out IBM, but I guarantee that they’re thinking about it, and I can also guarantee that IBM is going to be at the bottom of the list of companies to receive technical support when they run into a problem.
Sun was always a challenge when it came to getting technical support, if you were an ISV and ran into some kind of problem. On the other hand, working with Solaris was wonderful compared to HPUX, Tru64, and AIX. Doing apps was posix, but writing kernel drivers was a nightmare for everything but Linux and Solaris. Hell, even Windows wasn’t that bad to write drivers for.
So the instant IBM runs into some kind of problem they can’t solve, they’ll save time and gray hairs by not bothering to contact Oracle and just poking through OpenSolaris source code. Mind you, I’m not sure if it’ll be much better for anyone else. Windows is okay to target, because that’s all Microsoft does, and Linux is good because you can get the source code. But for these other hardware vendors, their OS is just a vehicle for selling hardware, so their OS tends to take a back seat to everything else, especially when it comes to support for developers. Oracle wants to sell databases. Their internal developers will get fantastic support (relatively speaking), but that’s about it.
Below is an article on new sparc processors and pricing comparisons..
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/sparc-t4-looks-to-be-g…
“Ellison repeatedly compared the performance of the T4-based Sparc SuperCluster to IBM’s Power line—and the Power 795 in particular. A one-rack T4 SuperCluster “is twice as fast as IBM’s fastest computer, at half the cost,” he claimed.”
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/497285
But all in all they have pretty unique software products. Hardware is not nearly the only factor.
IBM is also doing extremely well in the marketplace.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/IBM-surpasses-Microsoft-in-val…
Yeah, our Oracle sales droid droned on at us about those figures.
The problem was, that the ‘discount’s’ being offered by Oracle were nowhere near those of IBM.(IBM’s Q4 remember…)
He almost went appollectic when we asked him for a quote for running Oracle on Power 7.
That was enough to send him on his way.
Sounds like a pretty poor salesman to me.
Not really, from what I have heard Oracle have told their staff not to make the massive money losing sales that Sun used to do – if there is someone to ‘blame’ it is the management further up rather than the salesperson merely carrying out the orders.
IBM has Global Services. Oracle has nothing even close to that so I don’t see how Larry’s going to crush IBM.
In addition, the services arm is the single biggest Oracle “user”.
Yup… there’s a lot of IBM consultants out there, selling Oracle software on AIX/Power hardware. Upsetting that situation doesn’t seem a sensible move.
ok so nobody wil really get CLUSTERf!$@#d then
I wouldn’t be heartbroken if the itanium gets killed due to this. Although I guess intel may try to woo someone else, but it seems they’re running out of friends.
That’s all very nice, but these days you have to be power efficient as well:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/spec-launches-standardized-energy-effi…
Could one really say that Apple is designing its own hardware? Arn’t Apple just using of the shelf standard (IBM) HW?
They design, or customize whichever, the ARM processor they use in their i devices.
Aside from that, Intel does all the design work, and Apple does the packaging.
I think the thing to take away from that statement is vendor lock-in. Oracle wants to create a walled garden around their Sparc/Solaris/Oracle Db stack, and maybe sell phones and music.
Sounds like Ellison isn’t getting enough of his ya-yas out in his personal MIG-29. There’s just so much more to own!
If I remember correctly, the Power processors are designed to compute everything simultaneously on two different processors then compares the results. The idea is to rule out hardware flaws, but it also cuts the core count in half.
I don’t remember SPARC processors being designed to do that, so it’s not really an apples to apples comparison. It would probably be more valid for Oracle to benchmark against something with a Xeon.
Just for conversation, what advantages does Solaris on SPARC have over Linux on x86 (let’s say RHEL6 on Dell hardware)?
It might be possible to arrange that with a POWER7, but I don’t think it’s common – it sounds more like something you’d find in the zSeries.
The zSeries uses what they call the z/Architecture – the operating systems see a very CISC set of available instructions that’s backward compatible to sometime around the invention of the wheel, though with extensions for modern things like 64-bit operation. This is (I believe) implemented on some unholy combination of firmware and a POWER-based, but very customized, CPU.
It is a big world out there. Good luck to him. He has better watch out for arm processors instead of risc processors.
Have you ever wondered what the “R” in “ARM” stands for?
Edited 2011-10-08 03:01 UTC
Do you know the difference between the Power processors and the cheap ARM processors?
Actually, yes I do.
I assume you answer, since you could not answer the simple question, was “No.”
all you guys complaining about oracle should be happy. competition means oracle or ibm could get better
IMHO, at the moment, Oracle is just not that competitive.
We are throwing all our Sun kit (and HP Itamium for that matter) out at the moment. Just because the maintennance charges on the Sun kit have become silly (it is less than 3yrs old btw) and we use the HP stuff to run Oracle……
So it is X86 everywhere from now on. Sadly this is the wrong solution. SAP + Oracle on X86 is like trying to walk through a vat of treacle.
I’m having to put code in to a lot of JBOSS services to slow down the SAP calls as far too often we are getting ‘SAP is already processing that order. Please try later’ type of message.
Then the beancounters want to put it all in the cloud.
{visions of the Orchestra trying to arrange the deckchairs on the titanic as she sank come to mind.}
The only way Ellison could destroy IBM would be for him to become CEO of IBM.
It does seem kinda laughable, considering IBM is a company that’s endured for 100 years.
IBM will probably still be around in 100 years in some form or another. Even if they aren’t a computer company.
I have heard that Sparcs and Solaris were the fastest thing ever. Never seen one. Perhaps my University professor was making a big deal, since he managed to be a professor without a proper teaching degree.
Most university professors don’t have a “teaching” degree, they generally have a Masters or PHD in the field that they teach, which makes them more than qualified to teach.