Oracle and increasing international competition in the Exadata Server Market

Oracle and the increasing growth of Exadata Servers.

For my blog post assignment, I decided to search for articles on “computerweekly.com”. I found an article regarding oracle, and decided to use that since we’re diving into the basics of the application in class now. The article elaborates on the growing popularity of IDC’s application, Oracle, and it’s potential threat to IBM’s massive market share holdings as a result of improved server technology.  In the fourth quarter of 2013 due to a fresh outlook of the applications platform, Oracle has increased it’s revenues by 7.8%. As a result of these changes, the company’s market share on an international level has increased substantially. Oracle has a prominent market share in the Middle East, Europe and now Africa. These changes in the application platform were a direct result of the introduction of a new “t5 sparc chip” which allowed the company to gain a bigger part of data server market, making them a direct competitor to IBM, who uses power servers instead of sparc servers.  Oracle’s success has only continued as its recent growth areas have been in its engineered systems, which have increased by over 50% in revenue.  As a result of recent trends Oracle has also become a competitor in the appliance market along with IBM and Cisco because of it’s recent integration of “exadata”; which the article defines as “a monolithic product sold through an enterprise”.  As the trend for more advanced data servers increases in the European and international market, companies taking advantage of these advancements are seeing skyrocketing sales in comparison to those using more outdated servers, differences as much as 22.8% in revenue have shown.  International cloud service providers like IDC (Oracle), IBM and CISCO, are constantly partaking in large datacenter build outs, and commodity server sales at low prices. These major companies, mainly IDC are taking advantage of the advancement in commodity servers to increase the functionality and popularity of programs like Oracle, granting them a larger share of the database and computing systems market.

            After reading the article I felt it was very interesting to see how companies like IDC are becoming international competitors in the computing market. Simply because a program like Oracle is not universally used within most domestic IT and Business companies, whereas Microsoft Access is the kingpin in that aspect. Although, that’s not to say that Oracle isn’t popular or a successful application; I simply assumed that before IDC would increase its market share on an international level it would gain an even bigger piece of the U.S. domestic market. I think I really understood how crucial and paramount the annexation of international data servers for computing and social  networking companies is after reading this article. In the past few years companies are following this trend of investing in monumental data warehouses/servers in foreign countries like Western Europe and Asia. Companies are now in aggressive competition in regards to market share, advancements, and expansion. Because the cost to expand exadata servers internationally is so cheap, companies are investing in these attractive opportunities as fast as possible. I believe in the near future, when these major companies have populated themselves so deeply into the international market, data servers will become such a costly and valuable commodity, that competition and differentiation will sky rocket even further.