Oracle and Intel join hands to sink teeth into the IBM Power customer base

Soma Tah

USA: Oracle is looking to divert IBM Power systems customers to Oracle Engineered Systems which uses Intel technology. The CEOs of Oracle and Intel announced a new program Exa Your Power on the first day of its flagship event in San Francisco, Oracle OpenWorld 2015 -which will make it easy for customers to make the switch.

Oracle Engineered Systems (OES) run on high-end Intel Xeon processors co-engineered by Intel and Oracle, while the IBM systems run on its own Power processors.

Oracle Engineered Systems can deliver significant performance improvements over legacy IBM systems, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership, said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.

This comes at a time when IBM has been grappling with a declining hardware sales as well as a declining revenue from Power Systems through the last 11 quarters. It was down 3 percent compared with the 2014 period, reported the company in its recent Q3, 2015 earnings report.

On the other hand, Oracle reportedly has shipped more than 10,000 Engineered Systems since rolling out Oracle Exadata in 2008 and hence sees an opportunity to take a bite out of the IBM Power Systems business with this new program.

Oracle and Intel game plan:

As data is the lifeblood of any organization and its operations, and many organizations also have the business, legal and regulatory requirements to have immediate access to complete and accurate data - they find it hard to migrate data from one platform to another without taking on risk and cost.

To handhold customers in such scenarios, Oracle is offering a free database migration Proof of Concept (PoC). Oracle will assess the customer’s environment, deliver a customized database migration results report, and show how they can significantly reduce the time and cost required to run critical database workloads.

“Working together with Intel and our partners, we have helped thousands of enterprises quickly and easily move their Oracle database from their legacy systems to Oracle Engineered Systems,” said Karen Sigman, Vice President, Oracle Platform Business.

“Our companies understand demanding enterprise workloads and have long collaborated to optimize the performance and reliability of Oracle Database on Intel Xeon processors. The Exa Your Power program will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of moving to Intel architecture,” said Raj Hazra, Vice President, Data Center Group, general manager, Enterprise and High Performance Computing Platform Group, Intel.

Partner speak:

“For instance, CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads to Oracle Engineered Systems as a part of our Digital Transformation Services. We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Emerging Business Group, CSC.

“Our test results showed their Siebel Application running four-to-ten times faster and their ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on the Exadata,” said he.

(The author was hosted by Oracle in the US for the event)