IBM Lures Oracle Itanium Customers
Intel's Itanium is causing more headaches for HP and Oracle.
After Oracle announced that its software will not be supporting Itanium anymore, and HP is fighting to get Oracle back, IBM has launched an aggressive advertising campaign that is going after Itanium customers.
IBM states that it will continue support for Itanium with its DB2 database system running on HP/UX. According to the campaign, more than 1000 customers using Oracle databases switched to DB2 and, of course, IBM does not miss to note that "morethan 1500 clients" switched to IBM's Power architecture from Oracle/Sun and HP. And, yes, Oracle software runs on IBM systems as well.
A switch of a database is a costly effort in time, money, resources and potentially heart surgery for the availability of a business. It's unlikely that switches will occur without extensive investigation, but Oracle's announcement to move away from Itanium questions the overall investment protection in Itanium processors, which could be a huge problem for HP and its HP/UX and billion-dollar services business.
It is an obvious move for IBM to lure Oracle on Itanium users to a Power/DB2 system. IBM claims that DB2 may incur only one-third of the cost of an Oracle database and may be more than 90 percent compatible.
Contrast that with IBM, who took the high road instead of discontinuing DB2 support for Itanium. They're getting more hardware sales without even doing that, plus, they're getting DB2 sales for Itanium. And they look good doing it.
It's not clear why Oracle thought HP was their enemy instead of IBM in the first place, outside of possibly it being a petty vendetta. But, they damaged themselves and a company that's not really a competitor, and helped a company that not only sells hardware, but competing software, not to mention services. Nice job, Larry. I'm just glad I'm not a stockholder.
Personally, I don't think Oracle is screwing their customers. It sounds more like a business decision since Itanic has been a dying breed for a long time now. Perhaps it will finally die.
Unfortunately, the article does not mention how many out there have decided to skip IBM's offering and actually switch their hardware instead. It would be interesting to know what percentage of Oracle Itanic customers that the 1000 who converted represent. IBM is definitely trying to spin this in their favor.
I have to wonder if the move is a sign that Oracle is having financial troubles as well. Programing for a Itanium based system is far more complex and takes someone with experience to do it. Maybe they want to cut their development staff and this is the easiest way for them to do it, by cutting a product.
It does make you wonder what the motivation was, either way it's not a good sign for them.
Programming under Itanium (OpenVMS) is a part of my job.