Larry Ellison has said that with the acquisition of Sun he is ready to take on IBM in the enterprise.

Others don’t think so.

I’ve been steadily impressed with what IBM is doing in financial services. Everyone talks solutions, and has done for years, but IBM seems to offer the combination of hardware, software and services to make it actually happen.

Plus the company has some pretty good advertising, especially when you compare it to Microsoft – has anyone NOT seen the Windows 7 Launch Party commercial?

Now compare it to IBM’s snarky response to Larry Ellison’s claims that Oracle with Sun is ready to mop the floor with IBM. Big Blue hit hack with an electoral campaign-style spoof you can find on YouTube.

IBM hits back with YouTube electoral campaign-style spoof, Servers for Truth.

As Forbes’ Andy Greenberg put it

“Oracle and IBM’s knife-fight over high-end enterprise hardware is about to begin – and IBM intends to bring a cannon.”

Bob Evans, writing for  InformationWeek’s Global CIO, looks at what IBM has done and how it has tuned systems for high performance in risk management and insurance.

IBM has begun compiling lists and qualifications of its “workload-optimized systems” and offered some insights into its optimized-systems strategy from VP of next Generation Computing Systems Bijan Davari.

“We’re the only company in the world that designs the chips, fabs the chips, installs them in the systems, writes the hypervisor, writes the database, etc., etc., so that we, quite literally, have many tens of thousands of people focused on actually doing this.”

As an example, Davari talked about the risk-management side of the financial-services industry where “shaving off a few milliseconds can mean billions of dollars.” Achieving that type of breakthrough, he said, “requires optimization at every single point, in every single piece of the system, with every component, and every interaction.”

Pretty impressive and a challenge for Oracle.

Filed under: Technology