Blog: Krish Krishnan

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After the hype..

Now that Oracle has announced (Larry's keynote yesterday) that it is a "hardware" player and a "storage" player, where does this lead us to. If you have been following the trend, Oracle now has a direct face-off with IBM. Both the companies have been going through acquisitions and growth to capture the ever-growing BI market. A key question that still remains is - "leaving the big customers aside, do the solutions offered help small and midsize customers". The second question is "how cost effective is Oracle's newest offering - HP Oracle Database Machine and the Exadata Storage ".

In a conversation with Foster Hinshaw, CEO of Dataupia, earlier this morning when asked about his reaction, Foster's comment is "I have a great respect for Oracle and Larry Ellison as a visionary leader. But the latest technology offering from Oracle leaves the overall cost equation from an end to end implementation on a DW project".

I agree with Foster, if you are going to spend $2 million with Exadata over and above your current DW spend, how much is the solution delivery - $5 million or more?, we will need to wait and see.

As an Independent analyst and a great supporter of the improvements for the data warehouse infrastructure team, in my perspective, we have a new player in Exadata from Oracle, which is good news, not great news.

The "HP Oracle Database Machine" is very proprietary solution stack like the old NCR-Teradata model, which probably was something that Mark Hurd, HP CEO and Chairman, had successfully built during his tenure in Teradata.

Another interesting question is where does this leave the "HP Neoview" platform? are we seeing the fading away of "Non Stop SQL" into twilight amidst all this noise?

At the end, whatever one may say or feel about the latest Oracle offerings, I'm still looking at COST, COST and COST, not from hardware or software, but including implementation, maintenance and the whole nine yards.

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