Oracle Enters Hardware Market In Time For Slowdown (ORCL, HPQ)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 25, 8:51AM EDT

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There have been more press releases out of the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week than you can count. But one from Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) is perhaps the most interesting. It isn’t virtualization, it is isn’t on operating systems, it isn’t on collaboration, and it isn’t on acquisitions. Oracle has partnered with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) for its debut into the hardware sector.

Oracle isn’t going to be selling PC’s in Best Buy any time soon, but itis introducing the HP Oracle Database Machine for enterprises. The company aims tomake performance ramp tenfold over existing Oracle data warehouses.This will consist of a grid of Oracle database servers and a grid ofnew HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers packaged in a single rack orderedas a complete system from Oracle. You can read more about the details here at Oracle’s site.

This may seem like a game-changing event, but if you look at itsprogress this seems more like the natural progression of thecompany and the industry. Unfortunately, Oracle is doing this at the time when companies are experiencing severe businessinterruptions and are cutting back or slowing down on some of theenterprise plans into 2009.

Jon C. Ogg
September 25, 2008

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.