Oracle and Intel announce plans to ramp up the offensive on IBM in the cloud

Oracle openworld 2015Intel and Oracle are to build on a previous collaboration which saw them jointly take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Now they are conspiring again, this time to target Oracle’s database and software customers, in a bid to get them to ditch their IBM computer servers and buy Oracle/Intel servers instead.

The new pact was announced at the opening of Oracle’s tech conference as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage of Sunday with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. Project Apollo, in which the two manufacturers pooled engineers in a joint bid to investigate how massive cloud computing data centres can run faster using Oracle hardware with Intel chips, was pronounced mission accomplished.

On Sunday Hurd and Krzanich announced the new hardware partnership and a back up conversion programme. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said ‘thousands’ of customers have dropped IBM for Oracle when running Oracle software. To back this up, Oracle launched a migration support programme. The ‘Exa Your Power Program’ (EYP) is aimed to help customers move their Oracle Database from IBM Power systems to Oracle Engineered Systems using Intel technology.

The EYP is a free database migration Proof of Concept study in which Oracle will assess a customer’s environment, create a database migration results report and show how it thinks the customer could significantly cut the time and costs of running critical database workloads.

“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive General Manager of Oracle’s Emerging Business Group. “We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept.”

Mahadwar claimed that test results showed a Siebel Application runs four-to-ten times faster and ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on Exadata.

Transformation of the enterprise is already underway with the continuous improvements in a vast software ecosystem that Intel and Oracle jointly deliver according to Mahadwar. “The Exa Your Power program will make it easier for customers to realize the benefits of moving to Intel architecture,” said Mahadwar.