News & Views

August 4, 2010 from Information Week – “From those recent interviews with Oracle executives, plus an extensive analysis of public comments made by Ellison and other Oracle execs in the past 15 months, I’ve come up with what I think are the five main elements of Oracle’s strategy for the next couple of years. This strategy animates not only Oracle’s efforts to overtake both IBM (in high-end systems) and SAP (in enterprise applications), as Ellison has vowed to do, but also Ellison’s desire to reshape (a) some of the fundamental ways in which the IT industry has operated for the last 20 years, and (b) the standards by which customers will judge IT vendors. I’ll list those five and then go into more detail on each…

1. Optimized Systems and the Exadata Phenomenon. I’ve put this at the top of the Oracle strategy stack…”

180 View – You’re probably wondering what is meant by Exadata Phenomenon. In a linked article, we found the following explanation “Our overall strategy right now going forward is not to sell those individual industry-standard components on their own but rather group them together into machines like Exadata, where we have processors, networking, storage, storage software, database software, our Oracle Enterprise Linux operating system—all as a complete database machine for both transaction processing and data warehousing. We think that makes it much easier for the customer—they don’t have to buy all the individual parts and glue them together—but instead they buy the boxes: a high-margin product for us and a high-value purchase for them because they don’t have to spend a lot of money on systems integration.”

I can see the value proposition but there are many organizations that would not want to completely be at the mercy of one technology company.