03.23.07

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Ellison Continues to Exaggerate

Posted in Deals, Deception, Dell, Finance, Fork, Hardware, HP, Marketing, Oracle at 12:33 pm by Shane Coyle

Recently, Oracle announced that their Linux offering was picking up customers, most notably Yahoo!. Of course, Ellison had gone a little too far when he implied that Oracle had displaced Red Hat at Yahoo!, a statement that Yahoo! themselves disputed.

Well, now there has been some reporting that Ellison has also claimed that Oracle has signed up Dell, CDW and HP as resellers for Oracle Enterprise Linux. So far, it looks like these statements may not be holding up to scrutiny either:

Ellison also said Oracle had signed HP, CDW and Dell as resellers for Oracle’s Enterprise Linux (OEL). Oracle entered the Linux support business last fall when Ellison announced he would be undercutting Red Hat by offering direct Oracle support.

Turns out, Ellison was a little off on his reseller claims, though not by much.

Dell has not responded to request for comment from internetnews.com, but HP has. From what Doug Small, worldwide director of R&D of HP’s Open Source & Linux Organization wrote in an e-mail sent to internetnews.com, it looks like Ellison might have been just a little ahead of himself.

“HP and Oracle are in discussions about partnering and supporting OEL. Meanwhile, HP is testing Oracle Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, as well as HP StorageWorks products.”

Small declined to speculate on the potential business potential that OEL might represent for HP, though he noted that his company feels confident enough to invest in testing its products with OEL.

So, it may come true, it may not, but these are the types of potentially misleading public statements by a company’s CEO that should be scrutinized just as much (if not more) as those made by a marketing professional.

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3 Comments

gpl1 said,

March 23, 2007 at 3:59 pm

I thought Yahoo used FreeBSD?
Roy Schestowitz said,

March 23, 2007 at 6:20 pm

That’s right.

Oracle, Red Hat in Yahoo Linux Scrap

Not so, said Yahoo and Red Hat to News.com: Yahoo’s using both Red
Hat and Oracle.

Whatever. Sounds to me like Red Hat and Oracle are fighting over the ultimate booby prize. Yahoo might look like a great customer, on paper, unless you stop to remember that Yahoo mostly uses FreeBSD, an open-source rival to Linux. Winning this business is not going to make Oracle’s Linux business any less laughable.
Roy Schestowitz said,

March 23, 2007 at 9:07 pm

Also worth mentioning is Oracle’s new lawsuit, which leads to discussion about hypocrisy.

“Oracle sues SAP for allegedly behaving like it has toward Linux”

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/03/oracle_sues_sap.html

A bit off topic, I know, but also in news, Microsoft has shut down Soapbox on new people, arguing that too much copyright infringement is going in its own back yard. Not only did it try to FUD Google based on moral grounds — something which it cannot brag about. Now it turns out that Soapbox isn’t a saint compared to YouTube.