At the opening keynote of its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Oracle marched into the untapped world of appliances by announcing an in-memory BI Exalytics appliance and a Hadoop framework-based Big Data appliance. The announcements are further tangible evidence that Oracle is moving forward with its Sun-Oracle engineered products – hardware and software engineered together. They also ramp up the competitive pressure on the likes of IBM and EMC, as well as SAP of course and its HANA in-memory solution, but also with the new HP/Autonomy combo. Oracle will also be talking about new forms of data visualisation which is one of Autonomy's areas.
BI and Big Data offerings are potentially high margin solutions so there is a clear upside for Oracle here, while enterprise-class appliances are an untapped area due to their complexity If Oracle’s engineered approach can do something about this issue it will be on to a winner but so far there are precious few details about either appliance in terms of business scenarios. Hardware sales have been declining over the past couple of quarters as Oracle gets to grips with the business and switches to a high-end focus. It will be interesting to see where the appliances fit in.
This announcement has the hallmarks of a teaser so no doubt the business use case information will follow, but it does open up new lines of competition with IBM and EMC by reaching into their heartlands and puts appliances front of stage. HP and Autonomy have not been competitors to date but the new entity is now, so the fireworks we witnessed last week are not about to fade away. Watch out for a wave of appliances and software/hardware vendor partnerships and others look to seize the appliance opportunity too.