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Oracle Ends Partnership With HP
Rambo Tribble writes "As detailed in a Reuters report, Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP in light of their anticipated acquisition of Sun. With Sun servers in house, Oracle apparently feels no need to work with HP anymore. They will 'continue to sell the Exadata computers, built in partnership with HP, until existing inventory is sold out, if customers request that model.' Oracle is much more enthusiastic about a new version of Exadata, which they developed with Sun."
the FTC gets one more reason why the merger of these two companies should be raising eyebrows... We were worried anouhg about anticompetitive issues that might bubble to the surface, here;'s one that DID.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
This causes me to speculate if the reason behind the purchase of sun was that oracle didn't like doing business with HP, or saw that HP was making a ton of cash off the deal.
They need to produce an ultra-reliable appliance which runs Oracle -- Ugly as HP is, they had a partnership which delivered that in a unit.
Now they have the Exadata box with Sun chips, as of September 15 (press release). I for one (if I were spending such money) would want to wait a year before buying one of those.
I'm much happier with Sparc than PA-RISC, but HP makes things which just WORK. Sun has been known to roll out boxes with odd behavior. I'll need to see people very happy with their Exadata boxes for a while before I buy one.
Perhaps Oracle feels (perhaps rightly) that people will be forced to buy whatever they say. Period. And so they can push through a beta-ish time on this new equipment using their customers as guinea pigs.
It just seems wiser to co-exist for a while, then terminate the arrangement. But then Oracle has always been about squeezing people's testicles more than about being wise.
There's going to be a lot of shakeup over this one. IBM and Dell must be pondering the enduring fidelity of Oracle in a world where they make their own servers.
And that's a two-way street.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
symbolset makes a good point; hardware makers (Sun, HP, IBM) were platforms that ran Oracle systems. Now that Oracle has its own hardware, that market has been lost.
Of course, IBM and HP have been increasingly getting into the software/services business, in competition with Oracle, so Oracle's purchase of Sun might be the flip-side of this trend. Of course, this means that HP and IBM will have to rely on other vendors such as SAP to provide missing parts of the software/services business.
Best regards.
That Exadata box they announced:
"The appliance combines Intel Nehalem processors with up to 5TB of flash memory, fast DDR3 memory and SAS disks running at 6Gbps with a 40Gbps InifinBand network"
What IBM needs to do now is make a new version of DB2 that's fully software-compatible with the Oracle API so that you can take an application that's written to run against an Oracle database, and have it be able to talk to a DB2 database without being able to tell it's a different brand of database engine.
A long time ago I worked with an outfit that made a translation layer that let an app that was written to run against an HP3000 Turbo Image database, be able to open up and read/write to an Informix database running on any Informix-supported platform anywhere on the network. The app had no idea it was talking to a different database, it was 100% transparent.
If IBM could do something like that for DB2 to emulate Oracle, they could greatly undercut Oracle's expensive stranglehold on the mid-sized market where customers already have CRM software apps that are written for Oracle databases and they can't upgrade to the newest multi-core processor hardware because Oracle's licensing costs are so expensive.
"I'll take Boat Anchors for $10,000 please Alex."
I'm wondering what all those customers are going to do in the next year especially since they offered Exadata in a half rack option for expansion? This wasn't inexpensive either so I have to question Oracle customer strategy here too.
Hopefully Oracle will maintain backward compatibility for Exadata 2 as they call it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I love Sun products. But according to an Oracle DBA I used to work with, he experienced spontaneous reboots with an entire set of identical machines running Oracle. It took longer than the bank he was working for could stand to fix (more than a few months) and they dumped their entire Sun line for HP (at the time that was PA-RISC).
My personal experience with Sun boxes is that they are very reliable, but I've still seen spontaneous panics under heavy Oracle load, and found that fairly modern patches (much newer than the machine) were suggested for fixing those problems. That meant that getting the last panic problems fixed took _years_ after the machine came out. Solaris is generally a VERY stable OS -- we're talking about the icing, here, not the cake, but Sun is still fixing burps on machines years after their release.
My limited personal experience with HP (and HP/UX) was that the machines never paniced. My experience with them is slight, and I'm operating on a lot of hearsay.
However, I hated working with HP/UX. Dull frumpy stodgy OS. Solaris is dull and irritating compared to Linux, but it just doesn't compare to HP/UX.
Oracle is terminating one of their relationships with HP: to build this particular line of servers. The article says nothing about their other relationships such as the "Agility Alliance" partnership with EDS. The article clearly only refers to the hardware alliance, but the summary says " Oracle is terminating their cooperative relationship with HP ..."
On the other hand, EDS is/was Sun's biggest customer and HP overall is a pretty huge Oracle software customer, too. If HP ever decided to retaliate, Oracle would already be in bad shape on the hardware side and there are alternatives on the DBMS side that don't involve IBM or Oracle either. However, I don't expect this to happen. The Exadata business isn't that big a loss compared with the other partnerships. And HP could just reverse the relationship and bundle Oracle software on hardware they sell, with support coming via EDS' relationship with Oracle.
-Disclosure: I have a business relationship with HP, but in no way am I a spokesperson for the company. The opinions and speculations expressed here are my own.
We are the 198 proof..
HP was the platinum sponsor of the 11gR2 launch in Melbourne, Australia on 15 Sept 09. At which 11gR2 was announced as "... available for Linux, Windows and soon HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris while it's still around." They are pushing the "red stack," with the BEA jvm as the core of the mew system. Makes you wonder..
On the other hand, EDS is/was Sun's biggest customer and HP overall is a pretty huge Oracle software customer, too.
I think there are some "has been"s missing here. I think Larry Ellison has finally overestimated the length of his, er, grasp. There are balance of power issues in bridging hardware and software markets that Apple seems to get away with, but others don't. How Apple is doing the last five years relative to the WinTel alliance should tell you where this ends up (up 800% vs market performance +-5%).
If I were Mark Hurd I'd be looking to acquire a database company. MySQL is out, and that means recruiting the PostgreSQL developers into a well funded extrapreneurial endeavor. HP loves this sort of game, and they do it well. They got caught goofy footed so they better play this right if they want to come out on top.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
.. in my humble opinion, HP is a great company with increasing sales and market share. Sun on the other hand, is the opposite.
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