Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) has made it official. The company intends to compete with IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) in the battle for the hearts and minds of IT professionals. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was completed earlier this year, has given the company a hardware platform that it plans to use “to deliver complete working systems,” as CEO Larry Ellison put it at Oracle’s annual customer meeting.
Ellison offered props to
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs, noting that by controlling both the hardware and the software, as Apple does, “the overall product is better.” Well, maybe. The overall product could indeed be better, but IT vendors like Oracle are not exactly selling $200 smartphones.
It is true that both Oracle and Apple try very hard to wring every last dollar they can from every customer the companies have. Apple does it by introducing products that strike customers and competitors nearly dumb. From the first Macintosh to the latest iPad, Apple’s string of innovative products has kept the company at the forefront of innovation.
Oracle’s path to profits has depended less on breaking new ground and more on incremental sales. Now that Oracle has a full-blown hardware platform to build on, the company can implement a strategy of building complete solutions that it can then sell and service for a tidy sum.
The companys points to its Exalogic Elastic Cloud system, which it bills as the first integrated middleware machine. The system combines state-of-the-art servers, storage, software, and virtualization to create what Oracle calls “a cloud in a box.” Oracle claims that its cloud system can grow nearly instantly by adding more virtual machines on demand. This capability challenges the dominance of VMWare Inc. (NYSE: VMW) as the virtualization vendor of choice.
Of course Oracle still has to execute its strategy, and while it is taking orders for its new systems, Oracle won’t ship anything for another month or so. When they do, though, IT shops will have another vendor to choose from for a soup-to-nuts solution to the big problems that companies face: the explosive growth of data in already-huge data warehouses; the number of users trying to get at that data; the difficult-to-answer queries users ask about the date; and very fast response times. The vendor that supplies the best solutions to those issues has a bright future.
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