Yeah but isn't Exadata largely just off the shell components? At it's heart it's a high end Intel server running Linux. I wouldn't say this product makes Oracle

Yeah but isn't Exadata largely just off the shell components? At it's heart it's a high end Intel server running Linux. I wouldn't say this product makes Oracle a hardware company in the same way that Apple and Sun were. This just proves Oracle are a software company like Microsoft (ie they do dabble in hardware but it's the software that makes their margins). I guess another way of putting it is this: - do they build the software to sell their hardware, - or build their hardware to sell their software. In the case of Apple and Sun, it was the former. In the case of Oracle, it's the latter.