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July 27, 1998

Multimedia Venture To Link Oracle8, Irix

Goal is to provide advanced video

By Martin J. Garvey

ilicon Graphics Inc. and Oracle this week will unveil a joint business unit focused on expanding the use of high-end multimedia technologies among mainstream organizations. The goal, officials say, is to interest more business customers in implementing cross-selling and real-time marketing applications that rely on video-based data warehousing and video-serving technologies.

The joint venture will provide Silicon Graphics with an opportunity to deliver its products to Oracle database customers, many of whom are outside Silicon Graphics' niche high-end entertainment and technical-scientific markets. The companies expect to staff the unit throughout the fourth quarter.

Silicon Graphics brings to the table the powerful software and scalable servers required for processing memory-intensive and storage-hogging video and sound data. The parallel nature of the Oracle database should let it support customers who want to scale Silicon Graphics' Unix-based Origin NUMA systems to handle growing video requirements.

Key to the multimillion-dollar deal is the companies' ability to provide tight integration between the Oracle8 database and the Irix operating system, to offer the performance required to acceptably run advanced video in applications. According to Frank Hanehan, Silicon Graphics' Oracle strategic business unit manager, Oracle 8.04 running on a 32-CPU Silicon Graphics server has the best price/performance for 300 Gbytes of database processing based on industry-standard TPC-D benchmarks.

Ray Wong, Oracle's VP of platform technology, says the new unit is an example of the company's efforts to invest in server vendors with expertise in particular technologies or businesses. "We will segment the market and partner with server vendors when they demonstrate better offerings," Wong says. "This agreement puts Silicon Graphics on a par with the big guys."

Morgan Gerhardt, an analyst with the Meta Group, doesn't agree with Wong's assessment of Silicon Graphics. "Does [the agreement] alter Silicon Graphics' position in the marketplace? No," he says. He notes that Oracle already spends money to ensure that its database runs well on Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun servers, which make up half of the market. This investment, he says, won't alter those numbers in Silicon Graphics' favor.