Dell, Oracle in tandem

By ADAM GIFFORD

Oracle New Zealand has given Dell the inside track for new projects, leaving long- time partners Hewlett Packard and Sun to sweep up the crumbs.

An alliance announced by Michael Dell and Oracle's Larry Ellison more than 18 months ago has finally come to these shores.

It involves both companies working together to make Oracle's software perform well on Dell machines, particularly in clustered or grid environments where the database is shared among multiple machines.

Dell is the only hardware vendor able to sell Oracle's database pre-loaded on its servers.

It is part of Oracle's response to the rise of Linux and open-source computing, which is changing the economics of the industry.

By encouraging customers to run its software on standards-based commodity servers running two or four Intel processors, a market where Dell is dominant, Oracle stands to gain more IT spend.

Oracle New Zealand manager Robert Gosling said 11 customers here were at various stages of installing Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster).

"All but one of our application sales over the past year has been on Linux," he said.

Most of those sales have been on HP hardware, as HP customers shift off HP-UX on to Linux.

Dell is expected to chase new sites, but it will find HP, Sun and even IBM fighting hard to retain customers.