Oracle feels the effects of the global recession, delivers lower numbers
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December 22, 2011
Oracle, the world's second largest software company is starting to feel the effects of the current global recession,
as the database giant delivered lower second fiscal quarter numbers.
And those results are important to all the rest of the IT industry since Oracle is now considered like IBM and Microsoft--
if revenue is down for those three companies, they will most likely be lower for the rest of the industry as well.
For one thing, Oracle's global server sales dropped considerably, and new software license sales and renewals didn't
grow anywhere near what company CEO Larry Ellison had predicted in January of this year. And it's pretty much of the same
for most of the divisions at Oracle.
However, it's not all that gloomy. Sales of the company's line of Exadata and Exalogic servers were actually higher.
"Apple has over 30 Exadata server systems as they are building their cloud," Ellison said in a conference call.
Apple has been very secretive about the equipment that it installed inside its Maiden, North Carolina, data center
that it built early in the summer, and for obvious reasons.
For example, an Exadata X2-2 enterprise database system has eight two-socket servers, three QDR InfiniBand switches,
and fourteen Exadata storage arrays, complete with flash memory and special software to compress and preprocess large chunks
of data for database clusters.
Ellison did a lot of name dropping about who was buying the Exadata servers and how it was stealing away business from
IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
For example, the University of Melbourne acquired four new of its systems to run Fusion middleware, winning business away from competing Cisco blade servers running VMware virtualization.
Oracle's Exalogic servers run the company's implementation of the Xen hypervisor on a cluster and drops Fusion instances
on top of Oracle's Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also acquired five Exalogic servers to sit between applications and the Exadata 11G
database clusters the agency already has installed.
Additionally consumer giant Amway tossed out IBM's Power Systems machines and put in two racks of Exalogic servers to act as the middleware layer supporting a mix of custom-designed and Oracle E-Business
Suite apps.
And Oracle won another IBM account, the Hyundai Motor Company which bought an Exalogic server as well.
Ellison added "I know that IBM is running a lot of ads saying that their servers run faster than ours, but I'd love to
see their customer references because we haven't seen one."
"We've seen a lot of ads, but no customer references. We have lots of customer references where we are replacing P-Series
IBM servers with our machines. I'd like to see at least one customer reference from IBM but so far I haven't seen any,"
added Ellison.
Ellison also said that a big European bank now had over 24 Exadata systems and that market research firm AC Nielsen had
moved part of its IT infrastructure off IBM servers and onto Oracle hardware and software.
Oracle also won four SAP customers, moving their databases from other systems to Exadata.
Ellison didn't specify what those prior systems were, but given the distribution of servers running SAP applications,
the likelihood is that it wasn't Sparc servers, but Hewlett-Packard Itanium or IBM Power Systems servers.
It will be interesting to observe what the next couple of quarters will be like, not just for Oracle as a company,
but for the rest of the IT industry. As usual, we will keep you posted on these and other news.
Source: Oracle Corp.
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