HP and Oracle tout e-commerce development pact
Get ready for a big wedding in the Valley.
Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announced today they are getting together to marry Oracle's CRM (customer relationship management) applications and HP's development platform.
Under the terms of the agreement, HP and Oracle will intermingle internally and cross-sell each other's systems. For starters, HP will use and co-sell the sales component of Oracle's CRM suite. The companies will also share CRM sales leads. Oracle, in turn, will pursue development based on HP-UX, which will become a strategic development platform for all Oracle applications, officials said. In addition, Oracle will run its Business OnLine hosted applications model on HP systems as well as internal Oracle applications, such as CRM and email.
The deal marks new ground for HP, which has traditionally shied away from developing strong partnerships. New HP President and CEO Carly Fiorina said the company is committed to pursuing Oracle's rentable-applications model for enterprise software sales. Oracle's Business OnLine program offers hosted applications that customers can pay for on a subscription basis. "This is a shift from the way Hewlett-Packard has done business in the past when we were like a Switzerland," Fiorina said. "We believe that pay-as-you-go software is the future."
As for Oracle, CEO Larry Ellison said the deal will boost the company's ability to support customers by brining HP support personnel into the fold. He also reassured a gathering in Palo Alto this morning that the deal is exclusive -- at least for the time being. "We have no plans to do an agreement like this with anybody else," Ellison said.
Shares of HP were off 1 9/16 at 102 7/8 on the New York Stock Exchange. Oracle's shares were off 3/4 at 45 7/8 on the Nasdaq stock market.