The hardware appliance for Oracle was Itanium on HP-UX. Oracle pushing it as recommended platform until their Sun acquisition is pretty much what kept it afloat

The hardware appliance for Oracle was Itanium on HP-UX. Oracle pushing it as recommended platform until their Sun acquisition is pretty much what kept it afloat after introduction - if the billing system used Oracle RAC as backend, it might be the reason for using Superdome. From my perspective, Alpha had quite wide user base, not as much as Sun which seemed to have figured desktop unix sales way better than everyone else. I know some segments tended to buy Digital because if you knew what you wanted, Digital would let you simply order it - disappearance of that approach, forcing everyone to go through a sales rep, has been anecdotally pointed to me as why a bunch of places migrated post Compaq acquisition.