Global CIO: Oracle Dumps HP After Co-Creating 'Most Successful Introduction Ever'Global CIO: Oracle Dumps HP After Co-Creating 'Most Successful Introduction Ever'

Oracle is fighting back against the main source of customer poaching from Sun Microsystems' customer base: IBM.

IBM has been offering "Sun-set specials" for Sun customers to migrate by the end of the year to its Power hardware running AIX Unix. It has advertised in the San Jose Mercury News, "Don't settle for an uncertain future." HP, also a Unix hardware vendor with with its Itanium servers running HPUX, has also been attempting to lure more customers from Sun. "HP To Sun Customers: We've Got Your Back," is one of its messages to them.

But Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is singling out IBM for his response. In an ad that ran in some editions of Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Oracle promised it will spend more on Sparc hardware "than Sun does now," and compete head to head with IBM on hardware after it takes over Sun. "We're in it to win it. IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business," said the ad, above Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's name.

Ellison and Oracle have a good chance through that marketing effort to give some Sun customers reasons to believe until the EU busy-bodies get through playing whatever games they play and finally grant their approval for Oracle and Sun to get back to their core businesses.

But the big move was Ellison's outreach to Sun to displace HP on the white-hot Exadata brand, and to make the new Exadata 2 a showcase for how the two companies could collaborate going forward to deliver bundled systems that truly are optimized for greater customer value and utility.

In the meantime, Oracle and HP will continue to sell the remaining Exadata 1 inventory, but beyond that it's likely that the two companies will be doing a whole lot more competition than collaboration.