Database market leader Oracle Corp sees no conflict between its recently enhanced alliance with storage vendor EMC (CI No 3,777) and the partnership announced in September with server manufacturer Hewlett-Packard Co (CI No 3,759), despite HP’s avowed assault on the storage market.
HP nudged its way into Oracle at the expense of Sun Microsystems Inc in September, when it gained an assurance that part of all Oracle’s development work and 50% of its internal systems would be carried out on its boxes. Its servers will also be certified to run new Oracle software products simultaneously with Sun’s. The counterpart to this was that HP would be expanding its CRM consulting business, with Oracle as the software package of choice for deployment on its boxes.
Then at the end of last month Oracle unveiled a deepening of its relationship with EMC. This entails the creation of a joint development center and dedicated business unit at its Redwood Shores campus in Silicon Valley, to integrate and co-market its 8i database and EMC enterprise storage systems.
This begs the question of whether the fruits of the Oracle-HP colaboration, such as the Raw Iron ‘operating systemless appliances’ that debuted earlier this month at rail service operator Eurostar in London (CI No 3,763), might not some day cause conflict between the two alliances. After all, won’t HP want to provide the storage for such products instead of EMC, which it could do with HP-badged kit under the OEM deal with HDS (CI No 3,687) that replaced the reseller agreement with EMC in June?
No doubt it will, but Oracle has no intention of changing the state of play. We already have EMC storage within our development and product environment, and we don’t intend to change that, said Oracle senior VP at its platform technologies division, Michael Rocha.
