Intriguing Dell announcement at Oracle OpenWorld: an additional step in Dell transformation
Oracle OpenWorld is not as crowded as the Salesforce Dreamforce event, but without any doubt it is a major event of the IT industry, and as you all know it took place last week in San Francisco and was attended by over 60.000 visitors. The main press coverage of this year’s conference was not the announcement of some new cloud applications from Oracle, nor a new version of its flagship database, or a new engineered system, but the absence of Larry Ellison during his usual keynote session. Larry disappointed a lot of the attendees by skipping his presentation in order to watch the America’s Cup sailing race. That being said and even if Ellison’s Oracle Team USA fought back and finally won the biggest trophy of sailing, I want to discuss and share with you an announcement that took place during the third day of this conference.
Dell and Oracle Partnering
Michael Dell announced that Dell and Oracle are once again deepening their business and technology relationship. I will highlight in the following paragraphs why I consider this event as one additional step in the transformation of Dell in order to become an Enterprise Datacenter player.
Let’s start by understanding one of the 3 solutions presented: “Availability of new integrations between Oracle Technology and Dell Infrastructure”.
Monitor Dell Infrastructure with Oracle Technology
Dell demonstrated integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager that will enable customers to uniquely manage their infrastructure stack, Oracle Database and Applications from a single management console. By tightly integrating Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c with Dell OpenManage, customers can use a single interface for a complete view of their infrastructure – from hardware to the workloads and applications on top – to maximize performance, achieve operational effectiveness and improve resource optimization.
Oracle Enterprise Manager has helped customers monitor and manage their Oracle workloads for years. The planned integration with Dell OpenManage, leveraging unique agent-free embedded management on Dell’s x86 PowerEdge servers, means that customers will be able to monitor Dell servers, storage and networking infrastructures directly in the Oracle Enterprise Manager console.
Dell owns Toad Tool for Oracle Developers
What’s more Dell is now the owner (through the Quest Acquisition) of Toad “Tool for Oracle Application Developers”, the best friend of any database Administrator. Michael announced a Mac version and an updated version to support Oracle 12c, the cloud version of its DB.
Could Dell be as innovative as Salesforce?
I speculated in a previous blog post that Dell could be as disruptive in the IT Enterprise market as it was in the pc market 20 years ago . I even dared to compare Dell to Salesforce during our last BBQ event, insisting that Dell can be as innovative as Salesforce, if they execute their transformation correctly.
Dell Oracle relationship: the rationale
My personal take away from this Dell Oracle announcement and from the latest quarterly financial figures published by Oracle is that the relation between Dell and Oracle is at the eve of a very deep tightening and a major joint push. Here are the some explanations for this tightening:
- Oracle hardware sales are continuously decreasing since the Sun takeover, and they were already in a downward spiral in Sun’s last years as a public Company, Hardware sales were 13% lower in Oracle Q1FY2014 vs Q1FY2013, the absolute value is less than 670 millions us$ and this includes storagetek backup systems, Sparc servers and all the rest, so Oracle is basically now non-existent in the X86 market except for their engineered systems.
- Dell brings to the table things that Oracle doesn’t have, like a high volume and extremely competitive X86 server platform, superior networking and very competitive storage capabilities.
- Oracle brings to the table, Enterprise recognition with thousands of customers and deep presence in almost every vertical.
The next step of the tightening can be Dell hardware inside Oracle engineered systems. Are you willing to bet on this common sense guess?
Impact on ASP and our customers
All the above, is just positive news for us and our customers, as we have already today the certification and the technical knowledge in all Dell Server, Storage, and Networking solutions to deliver an enterprise infrastructure on premise or in our private cloud with all the related managed services.