Intel CEO Brian Krzanich joined Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on stage at Oracle’s tech conference opening night on Sunday. These two companies have worked in partnership for several decades, and now they both have a common competitor in IBM, says a report from Business Insider.
Challenging IBM in Cloud Computing
IBM sold its Intel-based computer server business to Lenovo, and the company is now focusing on sales of computer servers that make use of its own Power chip. IBM was more interested in new areas and did not want to focus on computer server hardware, which is why it divested its Intel server business. It now has its focus on big data/analytics trend and cloud computing.
A few months ago, the head of engineering and products at Oracle, Thomas Kurian, and Doug Fisher from Intel’s Software and Services Group decided to set up a joint team of engineers codenamed Project Apollo near Intel’s facilities in Oregon, the report said.
The team has been assigned the task of figuring out how massive cloud computing data centers could be set up that make use of Oracle’s hardware and Intel’s chips to take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Project Apollo has successfully completed its mission, and the team members are now sharing “how to” documents to convince enterprise customers to use their technology in building data centers, the report said.
Intel, Oracle poaching IBM clients
And now Hurd and Krzanich have started another new partnership meant to target Oracle’s database and software customers, convincing them to ditch their IBM computer servers in favor of Oracle/Intel servers.
Interestingly, similar to IBM, Oracle also competes with Intel. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and with it gained the SPARC chips technology, which it uses in the most expensive servers. As the adage goes, the “enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ so Intel and Oracle are going after IBM together.
Oracle’s CEO said that thousands of customers who run Oracle software have agreed to drop IBM. This data is interesting, but keeping in mind that Oracle has 420,000 customers at present, the percentage is fairly low so far, the report said. How much this partnership between Oracle and Intel will affect IBM has yet to be seen.
