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."

Comments

motivation for purchase

[uncreativeslashnick]

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.

Re:motivation for purchase

[Locke2005]

Corporate officers have a fiduciary responsibility to not sign any deal unless they are making a ton of cash off of it, so why would Oracle ever expect HP to not be making a ton of cash? Yes, the purchase of Sun might be motivated by wanting to keep more of that cash for themselves, but again, that is just good business practice.

Re:motivation for purchase

[sakdoctor]

Oracle was sick of those horrible HP printer cartridges, and wanted to lower their printing costs.

Re:motivation for purchase

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Maybe it's the other way around: Sun is sinking fast due to uncertainty and so they make some bold gestures to show they're serious about making this merger work. Nothing shows you're committed like eating your own dog food.

Re:and in other news

[Zantac69]

Why should the FTC get involved? Where is the anticompetitive issue?

Oracle is anticipating that they will acquire Sun.
Sun is a competitor of HP.
Oracle originally worked with HP, but now they are going to work with Sun (or in-house if the aquisition goes forward) because they developed what they think is a better product in conjunction with Sun.

What is the FTC going to do - force Oracle to continue to do buisness with only HP to sell a product that they dont want to sell?

There is nothing to see here.

Seems premature

[wonkavader]

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.

Re:Seems premature

[Anonymous Coward]

HP doesn't sell PA-RISC anymore, they dropped it in favor of Itanium

Lions and tigers and bears, Oh My!

[symbolset]

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.

Re:and in other news

[daveime]

How is it anti-competitive for a software company to start manufacturing it's own hardware too ?

It's the same thing Apple has been doing for 20 years, and no one blinks an eyelid.

Not Using SPARC

[raftpeople]

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"

IBM

[Nick Driver]

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.

Re:IBM

[fsmunoz]

What IBM needs to do now is make a new version of DB2 that's fully software-compatible with the Oracle API

See here and here for example.

 

The Oracle compatibility feature will enable Oracle applications to run natively on DB2. In discussions with Gartner, reference customers tell us that DB2 runs 95% or more of Oracle-specific functionality found in SQL statements and natively runs PL/SQL, Oracle's stored procedure language. This is native functionality; it is not an emulator, nor does it require changes to the application code (other than the 5%, which is mostly minor functionality, not found in many applications).

Having said that, and while it is a worthy and very valuable feature, there is more than compatibility in play when trying to pitch a change in DB engine.

they can't upgrade to the newest multi-core processor hardware because Oracle's licensing costs are so expensive.

Not only that, but Oracle applies modifiers according to the processor type. This is in principle not something odd: it makes sense to differentiate per CPU type given the sometimes staggering difference in terms of processing capacity (IBM does the same with the PVU-based pricing). However, given the Oracle acquisition of Sun this could mean that Oracle will tilt the modifiers even more (last time I checked Sun cores had a 0.25 modifier value, the lowest of the lot).

Re:IBM

[drinkypoo]

I don't know if this is still true, but DB2 was the most scalable but slowest of the major RDBMSes last time I looked (on most hardware that would run all of the above.) Converting from Oracle to DB2 would have performance considerations even without a translation layer (not that Oracle was one of the fastest.) In order for this to have a hope, DB2 would have to have near-complete feature parity with Oracle. That's not impossible, but I also don't think it's true at this time.

Re:and in other news

[afidel]

Your cool kids aren't Oracle's target market. No one really cares too much if their last update to Facebook dies because the shared key mechanism died and they had to restore from backup, people really care a LOT if their paycheck doesn't get cut or their last deposit goes poof.