Moral of the Story: Don't Cross Oracle's Ellison (ORCL, HPQ, IBM)

Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison is pulling out all of the server stops, and said that they will be gunning for Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) in server marketplace going forward.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the crack came as Oracle introduced their new Sparc chip (developed by Sun Microsystems), along with other product updates.

Ellison said that the Sparc cluster set a record for online transaction processing, computing more than 30 million transactions per minute versus the typical 4 million from IBM (NYSE: IBM) and HPQ machines, and a previous record of 10 million transactions per minute.

The comments may have also been a little more personal than business.
Some comments from Ellison include:

• "We think the H-P machines are vulnerable. We think they're slow."; and
  
  
• "I like IBM, and I don't want to tease them very much."

Ellison's Oracle could sure use the boost. According to recent data from research
firm Gartner, Hewlett-Packard was tops among server revenues and shipments in the third quarter of 2010. Where did Oracle come in at?
Fifth in revenues, and not even in the top five for shipments.

As was widely publicized in the latter half of the summer, Oracle took on ousted H-P chief Mark Hurd as Co-President, in which H-P subsequently hired SAP's (NYSE: SAP) Leo Apothaker as their new Chief. Additionally, in late November, SAP was ordered by a federal jury to pay Oracle $1.3 billion for copyright infringement.

It's almost as if there's a Chuck Norris joke here somewhere, the subject of which would compare the infallible Norris and Ellison's exquisite beards and gritty determination.

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