Oracle takes on storage partners

Forrester Research’s Andrew Reichman has a good take on Larry Ellison’s latest competitive foray. During his Oracle OpenWorld Keynote, Ellison did, in fact, position the HP Oracle Database Machine (or Exadata) as an alternative to Teradata and Netezza. And that is true,  as far as it goes. And yet, as Reichman points out, Oracle’s other hardware and storage partners–some of whom were big OracleWorld sponsors, must be irked. Because this box is also taking aim at them.

Coopetition is a grand ol’ tradition in tech. Several years ago, while talking up his company’s desire to suck up more revenue from its own storage management, analytics and other offerings, Ellison warned applications, storage management and BI rivals that mined the Oracle’s installed base, to get out of his backyard.  Two of the companies he was shaking his fist at were Siebel Systems and BEA. And guess where they are now.

And so, with HP, Oracle is taking on Sun (which has its own data warehouse appliance work going on with Green Plum), NetApp and others even as those companies helped pay the Oracle OpenWorld bills.