Ellison: Oracle Out to Beat IBM in High-end Server Arena

The majority of Oracle headlines as of late have been related to the company's very public and lengthy legal battle with search giant Google. However, recently the company is making headlines thanks to its CEO's plans to knock rival IBM from the top spot in the high-end server market.

Larry Ellison's remarks were made  during an interview with Kara Swisher all All Things Digital's D10 conference.

Swisher asked Ellison if Oracle was a consumer company. The question was in response to Ellison's declaration that, for the first time ever, the consumer end of IT is bigger than the enterprise side. Ellison replied that Oracle wasn't a consumer company but instead sold to companies that are.

"Apple is a big customer. And all the phone companies — we are by far the most popular provider of automation systems all over the world," he's quoted as saying in the live-blog. "Our big competitor there is IBM, and we’re growing much faster than they are. IBM used to be number one in database; now we're number one. They used to be number one in middleware, and we're now number one in middleware. They're number one in high-end servers; soon we're going to be number one in high-end servers."

Larry also spoke about Oracle's plans to announce a new Cloud-based platform, which will be unveiled on June 6. Asked by a member of the audience about Oracle's plans for consumer cloud computing, Ellison stated that it wasn't going to compete with IBM in services.

"We are not competing with IBM in services. As services becomes more important for IBM, products are the tail and service is the dog. We think we can beat IBM in servers. That is the next thing for us. Exadata, Exalytics, Exalogic," Ellison said, adding that its other competitor, SAP, is behind compared to Oracle. "The interesting thing about [SAP] is that while we're rewriting all our big applications, SAP hasn’t even begun to rewrite their applications."

Ellison will announce the company's suite of cloud-based products next week, on June 6. Speaking to All Things D, he described Oracle Cloud as, "Platform as a Service. Database Service, Java Service and a bunch of applications. All on top of other acquisitions, like Taleo for talent management. A complex ERP (enterprise resource planning) and HR suite in the cloud. All running on Oracle hardware, and running in their own virtual machine."

The company is planning a launch event at its Redwood headquarters for next Wednesday but reports say Larry will officially announce Oracle Cloud via Twitter.

Jane McEntegart is the senior news editor for Tom's Hardware and Tom's Guide and also takes care of Tom's Hardware UK. She has been writing for Tom's since July of 2007 and covers a range of topics including software, computer hardware, consumer electronics, video games and mobile applications. Other interests include StarCraft and baking.