Ellison attacks 'on demand'
He also said that Oracle will double the number of staff at its two software centers in India from 3,000 to 6,000.
"IBM says if you have a mainframe with 16 processors and if you only use 8 processors, you pay for 8 processors. It's a pricing scheme," he said.
Unlike IBM's larger mainframes, his firm's "$6,000 boxes" running the Linux operating system and using Intel processors can be plugged into a cluster when required, he said.
"Our products are more cost-effective than what IBM is offering. We have extremely low-cost components. We don't know of any computers that are lower cost than these $6,000 boxes," he said.
Ellison was answering a question from an audience member who asked what he thought of rival database maker IBM's on-demand scheme. IBM has been selling its on-demand utility computing model as superior technology that allows customers to pay only for processing resources consumed on IBM servers.
The chairman and CEO of Oracle was speaking Thursday via a video link to guests in New Delhi, India from the company's global headquarters at Redwood Shores, California.
The event was held to launch the Oracle-HP eGovernance Centre of Excellence in India. This is Oracle's second e-Governance Center of Excellence, the first one being in Reston, Virginia, USA. The Indian center will support the eGovernance plans of central, state and local government bodies in India.
When asked what he thought of the relative strengths of China and India, Ellison said that India dominated in business and software services while China would continue to lead in manufacturing.
"We have some software engineering in China but we have much larger teams in India. We have 3,000 people in India and we plan to more than double that in the very near term, to 6,000 people. We will continue to invest heavily in India," he said.
An Oracle spokesman added that the firm's Indian operations has been growing in India at the rate of 100 employees per month, and expect to expand to 4,000 in India by 2004.
Ellison also made the point that e-government made it harder for corruption to thrive, as all electronic transactions left an easily traceable audit trail.
Oracle set up its India Development Center in 1994, as one of the first to tap in the country's software expertise. The company today has two centers, in Bangalore and Hyderabad.