Oracle is in talks to buy all or part of Hewlett-Packard's
middleware product portfolio, Oracle chairman and chief executive
Larry Ellison confirmed at the OracleWorld conference in
Copenhagen, Denmark.
His keynote address to the conference also predicted a dramatic
consolidation among systems vendors, which will limit the choices
for IT users. "That is not entirely good news," the Oracle chief
warned.
Ellison would not discuss the talks but did say that buying HP's
middleware business would be a "tiny" acquisition that was
comparable to Oracle's takeover of WebGain's developer tools last
week.
The HP middleware portfolio includes a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise
Edition) application server, a transaction server, a messaging
server, various XML tools, HP's eSpeak software for building
network-based services and its Process Manager business modelling
tool.
Ellison said that Oracle's own 9i Application Server "is pretty
much fleshed out" and that Oracle does "not need to buy an
application server".
Ellison used his keynote presentation to promote Oracle's Real
Application Clusters on Linux machines and attacked Oracle's
competitors.
Answering a conference attendee's question about how Oracle will be
able to grow while IT budgets are tight, Ellison predicted "a
killing field" because of the economic slump and said that Oracle
does "not need an IT spending recovery to grow".
"It will be utterly brutal." Ellison said. "You are going to have a
consolidation of [IT] spending on three or four survivors and those
survivors will do extremely well."
Supply chain specialist i2 Technologies and procurement software
makers Ariba. and CommerceOne are among the companies that Ellison
believes "will vanish". Their business will go to others, including
Oracle, Ellison said.
Ellison also launched a frontal assault on BEA Systems, its chief
rival in the J2EE application server market. BEA is the worldwide
market leader in that market in terms of revenue, according to
several analyst firms. Ellison, who claims Oracle's application
server already leads the market in terms of user numbers, said
Oracle will pass BEA in terms of revenue next year.
"I think we will be first in terms of revenue in a year," he said,
adding that BEA may be the next company to go under. "BEA is under
tremendous pressure as a niche player reliant on one product."