OOW 2009: The $10M prize

Larry Ellison was quite upset: IBM has been running a campaign called “Sunset” in which it has been telling Sun customers that Oracle is going to get out of the hardware business and therefore customers should start moving their software over to IBM servers. Ellison attacked this idea with presenting some benchmarks: “I’m always wary of these types of benchmarks because they usually involve one company’s systems being highly-tuned and then comparing them to a competitor’s standard configuration.” Nevertheless, Ellison said that he is so confident that this comparison will hold up that he’s launching a new program in which Oracle will pay customers $10 million if a Sun-Oracle configuration isn’t at least twice as fast as a comparable IBM solution. That’s a word…