Last week I wrote a piece about Oracle and its new announcements in the hardware space, but, after a week I would like to add something more.

Will Oracle drop the hardware manufacturing?

Part of the presentation we watched last december 2nd was about the partnership between Oracle and Fujitsu (you will find the full video here): from now on, every Oracle server will be co-branded with Fujitsu (the manufacturer). John Fowler (Executive VP for systems) had a lot of kind words for Fujitsu and their partnership, showing a very long roadmap (up to 2015) about the SPARC64 development, jointly efforts and so on.

I think we will see a more tightened partnership of these two companies in the near future!

  1. Oracle x86 server business is struggling! why not rebrand the x86 fujitsu hardware too?
  2. Oracle needs a strong manufacturer for its next T4 chip and servers: Fujitsu has the right resources (production plants for chips and servers all around the world)
  3. Fujitsu hasn’t software but has services! In one word: it’s not a competitor.  Fujitsu could be, and probably already is, a great partner to deliver Oracle way of thinking in Asia.

Oracle already owns the core technology for its stacks: Chips, backend (infiniband), flash, software. According to the Oracle way of thinking margin is all and nowadays producing small hardware volumes isn’t margin-safe… I think we will see more from Oracle+Fujitsu.

And what about the storage side?

Fujitsu has a good, but not famous, own storage proposition with its Eternus ranging from low-end to high-end enterprise products! A very good fit for Oracle to kill in one shot LSI and its frankly unsellable 7000.