Oracle Is Still Interested in Selling x86 Servers

Oracle's vice president of systems business recently shed some light on the company's policy regarding x86 servers, as it stated during a keynote speech that even if the company is not too interested in selling commodity x86 servers it's still willing to use these chips in machines running Oracle software.

"We see Intel as a key building block to whole families of systems,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, during his keynote at Oracle's OpenWorld event, cites Xbit Labs.

“What we aren't focused on is the large-scale x86 server business running, for example, the Windows OS. Our value is around enterprise computing," continued the company's rep.

At the end of September, Larry Ellison, Chief Executive Officer of Oracle, said during a conference with financial analysts that Oracle doesn't care if its commodity server business drops to zero as the company doesn't make “any money” from selling these systems.

He continued by adding that Oracle isn't interested in selling other people's intellectual property, such as the Intel IP and Microsoft IP found inside x86 servers.

“We do not make money selling that stuff, and we are phasing out that business. We have interest in selling systems that include our IP. That's how we're going to drive the profitability of our overall hardware business, eventually," said Ellison back then.

Outside of x86 servers, Oracle is also comercializing machines based on Sun SPARC processors which provide much better margins as well as profit from support, service and upgrades.

It is hard to believe however that these systems will be able to provide Oracle with the high volumes needed in order to gain access to discounts for hardware components such as system memory and storage drive, that are also required for building SPARC machines.

Oracle has acquired Sun in January of 2010 as the company wanted to gain access to the Solaris operating system as well as to the Java technology. Even since the beginning, Oracle said that it wants to increase the profit margins of the company it acquired.