Larry Ellison: Watch Out H-P (HPQ, ORCL)

Larry Ellison and Oracle ORCL are gunning for you Hewlett-Packard HPQ, so you better watch out, and you better not cry. You better not pout, because he's about to tell you why. Oracle is rapidly gaining ground on HP and IBM IBM in the high-end server market Ellison said in the conference call to dicuss earnings last week. Oracle's database machine, Exadata, has a strong pipeline. Its pipeline is now at $2 billion, he explained, up from $1.5 billion a quarter ago. "In data warehousing it's not unusual for our Exadata to be 10 times faster than the competition," Ellison said. Ellison continue to lash out at HP, saying the company is vulnerable to market share losses and he predicted a significant jump in Exadata sales in the new couple of quarters. "We think that Exadata will be a nice turbo-charger for our overall database business," Ellison proclaimed. HP responded, firing back at Oracle and Ellison. "HP is the number one provider of enterprise servers in the world," said an HP spokesperson, in an email to TheStreet.com. The company's Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) segment grew revenue 25% year-over-year during the fourth quarter, she added. "Larry Ellison bought a money-losing business that had steady market share declines for years. Sun customers are running to HP in droves because they recognize we deliver superior technology, performance and pricing," the spokeswoman went on to say. Exadata is a pre-packaged mix of hardware and software, that Oracle says is ideal for cloud computing and grids. In this holiday season, we're finding out who is naughty and nice. And it looks like Santa Claus came to town for the naughty.