Larry Ellison, chief executive of IT giant Oracle, says the company does not make any money selling commodity servers based on Intel’s x86 chips, and he does not care if customers stop buying them.
“We have no interest in selling other people’s intellectual property”, he said on a conference call with investment analysts yesterday. “Commodity x86 includes Intel IP and Microsoft IP. We don’t make money selling that … and we are phasing out that business.”
Oracle got into the commodity server business when it acquired Sun Microsystems last year. Ellison revealed that sales of these products fell during the most recent financial quarter, pulling overall hardware revenues down 1% to $1.7 billion.
The “high end” server business meanwhile, which includes the M-Series based on Sun’s SPARC chips and Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic integrated database appliances, delivered “solid double-digit” growth, Ellison said.
Overall, the company’s revenues for the three months ending August 31 rose 12% to $8.4 billion.
Application revenues for the quarter grew 17% year-on-year to $1.7 billion, not a bad performance but less than half SAP’s application sales growth in its most recent financial quarter.
