Software giant and hardware upstart Oracle has closed out its first ever $10 billion quarter, and the company told Wall Street that it can triple the base of Exadata clustered database systems in its fiscal 2012 year. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ending May 31, Oracle raked in $10.8bn in revenues, an increase of 13.4 …

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Friday 24th June 2011 06:56 GMT SunEngineer

Oracle FAIL

Lower hardware unit volumes = MUCH higher unit costs. IBM had a killer quarter, they took every "unprofitable" deal we passed up, and now the maintenance stream is theirs to mine - not Oracle's.

Safra's stupid comments are akin to Larry saying he walked away from deals Microsoft was willing to do at a lower price. Keep up that strategy, you lose all the deals.

That's brain death, not humor.

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Friday 24th June 2011 06:58 GMT russian-dude

Storage Architect

No wonder EMC, HP and IBM have become very hot-under-the collar about "big data" this year. Are any of them ever going to be able to challenge Oracle's dominance in this space?

Not any time soon, I suspect...

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Friday 24th June 2011 07:26 GMT Anonymous Coward

installed not sold?

>> Ellison said in the Wall Street call today that Oracle has installed over 1,000 Exadata clusters

If thats an accurate quote, then note they said _installed_ not sold - from what I've seen, Oracle are keen to put these things in as proof of concepts - but thats very different from a customer handing over hard $ for them.

>> "We'd just rather make money," she said with a chuckle. "We're funny that way."

Exactly - I think IBM's Steve Mills made a very inciteful description of Oracle here:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/062211-ibms-steve-mills-talks-oracle.html?page=1

" They're not a customer-friendly company. They want the customer's money and they're very creative with coming up with different ways to get the customer's money. They cannibalize their own ecosystem, they compete with their partners. It's a very pragmatic strategy. Whatever it takes to get money, that's what they're going to work on. If they think they can get money putting things together, they'll put them together. If they can only get so much money out of that, they'll take them apart and do it another way.

It's not driven by a strategy, per se, on some vision of where information technology is going. It's driven by the money-making motivation. All public companies have a motivation to make money. It's not a matter of, they're the only ones that think about making money. But some companies are more aggressive in their singular pursuit of that goal than others. "

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1. Friday 24th June 2011 14:23 GMT toughluck
  
  Installed vs. sold
  
  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this more a matter of how many Exadata clusters are installed compared to sold, but not installed yet? I.e., the sales team could have closed the deal already, but put it on a three-month backorder, then it will take some time to install, lab test and put into production.
  
  You seem to be taking the common definition of something being installed or sold, and not the one that's used by businesses.
  
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2. Friday 24th June 2011 20:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  re: installed not sold?
  
  IBM talking about someone else only in it for the money? Kettle/black/blah/blah. Have you ever seen an IBM project that did not end up twice what they quoted? Ever? IBM will sell one thing and deliver another. They make everything overly complicated so you have to pay them to do it for you... Give me a break.
  
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Friday 24th June 2011 10:15 GMT fch

... rather make money ...

... seems to describe Oracle very well. They're a thoroughly efficient hedge fund specialized to invest in Enterprise IT, traditionally software but now hardware as well.

What they're not is an innovative and/or service-oriented IT company. But then, since they have the money, they can afford to buy that in, asset-strip/mine it as they see fit, corner markets, all to get a good return on investment.

That strategy surely makes fund managers and investors money. What it does to those that happen to be either on the providing (as employees) or receiving (as customers) end of businesses run that way, well, we can read those stories aplenty in the papers any day.

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Friday 24th June 2011 18:33 GMT Allison Park

Look into the Oracle...and finally some truth from the big liar

We took the the Exadata champion in our organization off our promotion list for being stupid. The business case was insane with soft benefits of "integrated", "easy", and more Oracle marketing grap. We already have a highly efficient Oracle on Power installation and moving our virtualized environment to cloud with automation of the virtualization. $12M per rack is insanity which just causes further lock-in to the evil Oracle.

Ellison said in the Wall Street call today that Oracle has installed over 1,000 Exadata clusters (not racks, but distinct clusters) so far, and that it can triple the base to more than 3,000 machines in fiscal 2012.

So what does this mean. Well i hear that most customers bought 2-4 of those 2 socket boxes since you need at least two to use the RAC licenses you have to buy.

Let's just guess 4. That means they have 250 racks in the market. Most customers have to buy two or three racks. One for Production and one for Test/Dev. Banks have to buy three since they also need DR.

So when you look at what Oracle has really done in the last 2.5 years is "install" about 100 Exadata's. When you remove all the pilots/demo centers/partner centers/ISV free boxes...etc..

you still have less than 100 customers.

cheers...

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1. Friday 24th June 2011 20:41 GMT Matt Bryant
  
  RE: Look into the Oracle...and finally some truth from the big liar
  
  Funny story - well, maybe not for the Big Blue fanbois'n'girls, but funny for the rest of us. We've got an Exadata cluster downstairs. We haven't paid for it, even though we've had it "installed" for almost a year now. I'm guessing the Oracle rep hoped we'd load it up with mission critical data, then be too scared to migrate come the end of the free trial. He's in for a shock!
  
  The idea isn't new. Years ago we were gifted an IBM ESS "Shark" array, free for a year. We even got one of those silly plastic sharkfins to stick on top! IBM hoped we'd load it up with critical data, put it in production, and then be unwilling to unplumb it and be forced to buy it. At the end of the year it went back and we bought another EMC. The sharkfin went missing. Someone should have told Larry that stuffing the market with freebies doesn't mean your product will be a success. Maybe Larry should have poached a few guys from IBM rather than Mark "Fiddler" Hurd?
  
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2. Monday 27th June 2011 08:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  The Real Numbers
  
  This appears to be much nearer the truth from everything I now see & hear from Oracle employees. Customers turning away in their droves. In fact, most customers I talk to these days, do not even look at Oracle for systems. I guess if your locked in to the s/w, in for a penny, in for a pound.
  
  Not where I would want to be though !!
  
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Friday 24th June 2011 21:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

re: Look into the Oracle...and finally some truth from the big liar

Liar liar pants of fire! Allison we all know that you do not work in the IT. You may be a sales person or marketing person, but don't to act like your an actual IT person.

A cluster is not just a partial of a rack, it could be multiple racks. To say that Oracle has installed 1000 clusters it is a much more conservative number than the number of racks as there are often more than one rack in a cluster, but only one cluster in a rack.

Is Allison just MB in drag. At least MB seems to understand tech a little bit.

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1. Saturday 25th June 2011 08:59 GMT Allison Park
  
  How is your English?
  
  "but don't to act like your an actual IT person."
  
  "A cluster is not just a partial of a rack, it could be multiple racks. "
  
  Wow...did you start drinking early on Friday? What Oracle said is they have "installed" over 1000 Exadata servers. They made it clear it is not 1000 clusters. What would be even more damning is if they count the exadata storage servers and database servers as separate installs then you can take that install number of about 100 customers and cut it down to about 50. I am sure Larry is being very "creative" about counting his "success". Insane how he highlights his salesforce.com sale when he ridiculed them at oracle world for having a horrible infrastructure without security and protection. I guess he can push his stock ownership of salesforce.com to push the truth.
  
  My point is the numbers are still very small and they are still playing ketchup to Netezza and Teradata. As much as Oracle wants to relish in the cheap price they paid for Sun they still do not have a viable hardware strategy/offering.
  
  PS...We do not have any BI appliances as we prefer to host our BI on the production servers and use virtualilzation to contain the BI queries vs. production.
  
  fyathyrio
  
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  1. Sunday 26th June 2011 00:02 GMT Matt Bryant
    
    RE: How is your English?
    
    Bit harsh on the poor horse?
    
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  2. Monday 27th June 2011 07:01 GMT toughluck
    
    Well, how is *your* English?
    
    "Ellison said in the Wall Street call today that Oracle has installed over 1,000 Exadata clusters (not racks, but distinct clusters) so far, and that it can triple the base to more than 3,000 machines in fiscal 2012."
    
    In your own words:
    
    What Oracle said is they have "installed" over 1000 Exadata servers. They made it clear it is not 1000 clusters.
    
    To me, it's pretty clear Ellison said clusters. Care to re-read? BTW, you were replying to a post made at 9 p.m. and accused the guy of early drinking on Friday. You made your post at 9 a.m. on Saturday. What does that make you? Pot? Kettle? Black?
    
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  3. Monday 27th June 2011 18:34 GMT Billl
    
    re: How is your English?
    
    "Ellison said in the Wall Street call today that Oracle has installed over 1,000 Exadata clusters (not racks, but distinct clusters) so far..."
    
    So Allison, how is your English? The above quote is from TPM -- obviously not an Oracle/Larry apologist. Is Allison a liar? I don't know, but she likes to play loose with the facts.
    
    MB technical? Well maybe a bit more than Allison anyway...
    
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Monday 27th June 2011 19:21 GMT Matt Bryant

RE: re: How is your English?

".....Well maybe a bit more than Allison anyway..." Hey, at least I don't threaten horses with acts of beastiality!

You are also assuming that Larry would (a) know the difference between an Execreta rack and and a cluster (b) tell you the real figure if he could tell you one that sounded more impressive. Larry comes from sales, and you know what they say about the correllation between lying and the movement of a salesgrunt's lips.

The Safra Catz line on "not taking deals that don't make money" is interesting as the last quarter figures showed that the average Snoreacle unit UNIX server sale ($32k) was about half the price of either an IBM ($64k) or hp ($75k) one, implying Catz and co can only sell and make a profit in the low-end where margin is much less than the enterprise high-end. It doesn't look like there will be much margin to re-invest in Execreta TNG.

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Tuesday 28th June 2011 00:18 GMT Billl

re: RE: re: How is your English?

"...profit in the low-end where margin is much less than the enterprise high-end."

56% margins on HW seems pretty good to me. Analysts have used the word spectacular to describe it, especially in relation to Oracles competitors (HP/IBM). You're point again MB?

Regarding the horse comment... I have to guess that Allison mentioned such a penchant earlier?

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1. Wednesday 29th June 2011 11:14 GMT Matt Bryant
  
  RE: re: RE: re: How is your English?
  
  ".....56% margins on HW seems pretty good to me...." I was referring to the server sales figures, not the Oracle applicance figures. The appliance margin should be much higher as it's sold to people that don't know how to build their own stack, so they don't know how much they're being ripped off. But the number of appliances sold will be much lower than the general server figures, which is why Snoreacle needs to get their server sales both up in number and up higher in the enterprise stack. In the server arena, the lower down the enterprise stack you are (and Snoreacle still seems to be only selling well in the webserving niche), the lower the margins. It is higher up the enterprise stack that you get fatter support revenues, more opportunities for services attach, and associated high-margin sales (replicating storage arrays, disk-to-disk backups, etc). By the IDC figures, the average IBM or hp UNIX server sale value was double that of Snoreacle's, which means it is highly likely both hp and IBM made fatter margin on each deal and more additional margin.
  
  ".....I have to guess that Allison mentioned such a penchant earlier?" In her reply to an AC on Saturday 25th, 0859 GMT, Alli signed off with "fyathyrio", which is shorthand for "f*ck you and the horse you rode in on".
  
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