Engineered Systems for Retail

I've been speaking to analysts in preparation for attending the NRF Big Show next week, and one comment I heard concerned me.  The analyst said there's a misconception amongst some retailers that Oracle's software only runs on Oracle hardware.  Clearly that's a misconception, but I understand how people may have jumped to that conclusion.

Just to review, Oracle has announced three important engineered systems.  Exadata is the database machine, Exalogic is the middleware machine, and Exalytics is the BI machine.  Each system includes the hardware and system software built to work together for that specialized task.  Typical engineered systems provide about a 3X performance boost on average, with some tasks significantly faster.

Oracle's engineered systems are hardware and software built to work together.  The "software" part of the equation includes things like the operating system, database, and middleware but not the business applications.  One of the key benefits of this approach is that applications require no changes, so they will run on anyone's hardware as well as Oracle's engineered systems.

And specifically for retail, we continue to partner with different hardware vendors to test and certify our applications.  None of our retail products require Oracle hardware.  Buying hardware from Oracle is optional, and that's the plan for the future as well.

That said, there are lots of benefits from running Oracle Retail applications on Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics that retailers should consider.  Blazing performance, hardware consolidation, reduced energy consumption, and easy expansion are a few.