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Larry Ellison: As We Thump IBM, Our Next Target Is Teradata

Oracle

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (Image credit: Getty Images North America via @daylife)

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he expects that emerging technology will not only help Oracle continue to widen its database share lead over IBM and Microsoft but will also inevitably lead to more-intense competition with specialized database players such as Teradata .

Claiming that IBM’s DB2 “continues to lose share to us every quarter,” Ellison said Oracle is focused on developing new technologies that will have “very exciting specific features for the cloud.”

In the database area, Ellison recently noted that a new generation of portable databases will allow multiple tenants to securely coexist in the same database while also offering full support for virtualization.

To gain the full confidence of many businesses that continue to have concerns about cloud security and privacy, Ellison said database vendors must be able to ensure that customers’ data is “isolated and private and safe and secure.”

Those top-priority issues of  privacy and security complement other key themes that Oracle will be addressing at next week’s big Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco, which will feature Oracle and more than 50,000 of its best friends.

For the Monday-morning OpenWorld keynote, featuring Oracle president Mark Hurd and senior vice-president Andy Mendelsohn, topics will include “what’s next for the database, how simplifying and consolidating IT systems can benefit everyone from the DBA to the CEO, and how the data center and information systems are fundamentally changing the ways that IT services are delivered and managed,” according to the Oracle website.

The rapid and disruptive shift in the industry toward those business-driven themes have led Ellison to assert a bold claim: new competitive dynamics in the database sector will raise the stakes for Teradata and other relatively lower-profile players that have generally stayed under the radar of Oracle, IBM, and even Microsoft SQL Server.

As databases in general become more strategically vital, and as cloud technology becomes essential within advanced IT architectures, Oracle is betting that the combination of speed and cost-performance offered by its increasingly popular Exadata engineered systems will allow the company to stay well ahead of other alternatives.

“After SQL Server, we have some interesting specialized competitors like Teradata, and we believe that Exadata is doing a pretty good job of competing with Teradata,” said Ellison during Oracle’s recent quarterly earnings call with analysts.

“So we don't do lots and lots of head-to-head competitions with Teradata—yet,” Ellison said.

But in the future?

“I think we’re going to be watching that business and we’re going to be focusing on competing more aggressively with Teradata than we have in the past.”