Jovial Ellison cracks IBM jokes

Oracle supremo Larry Ellison has taken several potshots at his company's rival IBM, denigrating the power efficiency of Big Blue's hardware and opening fire on its blanket "Smarter Planet" marketing campaign.

Oracle chief Larry Ellison
(Credit: Chris Duckett/ZDNet.com.au)

During his keynote speech at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in the US today, Ellison claimed that Sun hardware running Oracle software had claimed the top spot in the TPC-C performance test from an IBM Power 595 server running AIX and DB2. Ellison claimed that the Sun/Oracle system had 25 per cent more throughput, consumed six times less power, eight times less floor space, and had the added advantage compared its IBM rival of being fault tolerant.

IBM's chip is called Power and now we know why

Oracle chief Larry Ellison

"IBM's chip is called Power and now we know why," Ellison told the audience.

Ellison's tirade continued as he equated IBM's Smarter Planet marketing campaign to former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin saying "Drill, baby, drill".

In the speech, Ellison also attempted to dispel any speculation that Oracle would be abandoning technology gained in its pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

Ellison pushed the advantages of one company having control of all of the hardware and software in an integrated system, using Apple as an example of what could be achieved.

"[It] limits to how far you can go if you build just software," he said. "Witness Apple [...] whatever you think of Apple, I think that they have done well in tackling hardware with software."

"That's what we are going to try to do with the merged company," Ellison added. "We are in it to win it. Take a great company in Sun and merge it with another great company in Oracle, and it allows us to do things neither could do on their own."

Reiterating points made earlier in the keynote by Sun chairman Scott McNealy, Ellison said that Oracle would spend more money on Sun's technology trio of SPARC, Solaris and MySQL than Sun had.

Earlier in the keynote, McNealy and Java creator James Gosling discussed whether Oracle was equipped to take over Java. Gosling said that many parts of Oracle's software portfolio is based on Java but the company might not be ready for the influx of numbers in the development community; with Gosling claiming "an extra couple of digits" in size between the Java community and Oracle developer community.

"I've never worked for a software company, so that'll be an adventure," said Gosling about his future. "They won't be a software company after we're done with them," retorted McNealy.

Chris Duckett travelled to Open World as a guest of Oracle.