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."

and in other news

[Sandbags]

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.

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.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[Timesprout]

I think you will find the EU are doing more than blinking their eyes in Apples direction recently on the anti-competive front

Re:

[daveime]

No, I mean I wasn't trying to be critical of Apple (not on this topic at least).

Let's say I run a bicycle building shop, making all the frames in house, but getting my wheels from a third-party supplier. Then I realise that if I buy that third-party or even just partner with him, I can maximize my profit by reducing expenses or getting a discounted rate.

That is NOT anti-competitive, that is good business sense.

What *is* anti-competitive is telling that third party that he can only supply wheels to me, but n

Re:

[cryfreedomlove]

It is not raising my eyebrows. Most large scale internet apps are abandoning RDBMS in favor of distributed key value storage. Oracle will live a long time feasting off the carcass of existing customers but that will surely dwindle over time as the cool kids continue to do their own non-RDBMS thing.

The FTC should focus on other things. Things like reconsidering whether working at the FTC will really ever help them score with hot women.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[CharlyFoxtrot]

If they considered this anticompetitive they would've broken up IBM years ago.

Re:

[thetoadwarrior]

If this raises eyebrows then what about Microsoft?

They sell the server and client software, the programming languages (.net), the game console which is a locked down piece of software meant to only operate with their software, they sell the mobile phone OS that works best with their software and their sell the music player that works best with their software.

They offer anti competitive free software, like anti virus, zip archiving software, browsers, media players, email clients, they're not attacking

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:

[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:

[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:

[afidel]

These systems are a small drop in the bucket for either company, no one is spending billions to buy a company over some boxes that probably sell in the double digits per month at most. The motivation is that Sun has lots of large government contracts and big business wins yet was executing extremely poorly and so was valued very low by the market. Oracle figured they could manage the assets better and so they took so money out of their cash reserves and bought Sun.

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 [oracle.com]). 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:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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"

Re:

[Virtucon]

If you bought an HP DL380 G6 or DL370 G6 you wouldn't say that HP just makes it work. Too many settling issues for my taste.

Don't get me wrong

[wonkavader]

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

Re:

[wonkavader]

My DBA wasn't the sort to know those kinds of details -- but that's a VERY interesting example (and might be the only one). It's new to me -- thanks for the detail.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sun has been known to roll out boxes with odd behavior

Yeah... I used to run an Ultra Enterprise 150 - the computer built out of styrofoam, and that was just the start of its quirks.

Anyway, Oracle isn't going to put out boxes that don't run Oracle well. Any other uses may be 'off label', but I bet they start making boxes that are really good at that one thing.

Re:

[Major Blud]

I agree with you, but I don't believe the HP Exadata setup used PA-RISC. http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/017557_EN.doc [oracle.com]

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.

Oracle and coopetition

[mollog]

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.

Re:

[Red Flayer]

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.

/shudder/

Hopefully they will rely on SAP as much as Oracle relied on Peoplesoft. Which is to say, not much at all, other than as an inroad into a customer list.

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 datab

Re:

[oyenstikker]

IBM would have to do a lot more than support Oracle's SQL. They would have to support PL/SQL and all the hooks into very Oracle specific things like RMAN.

Due to significant differences between the ways Oracle and DB2 work, applications written to be fast on Oracle are probably not going to perform nearly as well on DB2, even if the application could be altered without much work to be faster on DB2.

Re:

[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 [gartner.com] and here [ibm.com] 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

Re:

[Nick Driver]

Wow! I'm a bit out of touch with recent events in the DB2 world. If they could overcome that last 5% and also give us Pro*C and Pro*Cobol work-alike capability, then I know of several apps that could be ported over to it in very short order.

Re:

[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.

Jeopardy

[Virtucon]

"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.

Bad summary?

[bwcbwc]

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

Larry still loves me - he just has control issues.

[symbolset]

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 th

Ironic...

[yorktimsson]

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..

Bad move..

[SlashDev]

.. in my humble opinion, HP is a great company with increasing sales and market share. Sun on the other hand, is the opposite.