UPDATED 08:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 20 2015

NEWS

Is it the end of horizontal infrastructure? | #oow15

With Oracle’s OpenWorld 2015 event, Oracle is making a move to capture some of the infrastructure behind its database empire. Chuck Hollis, SVP of converged infrastructure systems at Oracle, joined theCUBE (from the SiliconANGLE Media team) to discuss the future of infrastructure.

“I’ve been in the infrastructure business forever … and we see this kind of [commodification] of everything that’s going on,” Hollis said. “What you’ve seen is our ability over the years to engineer an entire stack and delivery mechanism from the database all the way down to the chip, to the operating systems, storage, etc.”

Hollis sees huge opportunities for Oracle in specialized customer solutions that encompass the whole stack. “Both our customers and our partners are looking for optimization,” he said. They’re not looking for generic solutions. If we captured even half of the IT footprint that sits behind the Oracle database, we could sell five, six times as much infrastructure in the next few years. Very exciting times, especially given everything else that’s going on in the industry.”

This trend is bad for companies that occupy a single niche, Hollis believes. “Horizontal technology vendors are getting compressed. The server guys have to strip out all their margin and get very competitive. Storage guys …. [are] going down the rathole the same way,” he said. “I don’t think the hypervisor guys are much farther behind. I think Cisco has a pretty defensible franchise, but unless you optimize behind something important, you’re just parts and pieces out there in the industry.”

He feels that Dell-EMC merger plays into this move. “I look at the Dell-EMC [merger] as kind of the inevitable,” he explained. “You basically have two horizontal technology vendors who think they can compete on size.” Will it pay off? Maybe. “What we’ve known is that customers crave certainty about the future. They want to know what they’re investing in now is going to pay off three years, five years, seven years from now.”

Hollis added, “It’s very hard for these horizontal infrastructure vendors who are undifferentiated to create any sort of certainty about where they’re going in the future.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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