Last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made comments to the effect that Oracle Corp. will not be competing against the likes of HP and Dell in the commodity server market. Instead, said Ellison, “Oracle will focus its Sun franchise on high-end servers, leaving other hardware providers to duke it out”—concentrating on large Sparc-based SMP servers. Ellison added that “Sun just really does not now and is never likely to have the volume to compete in the high-volume, low-margin business of just selling an Intel server with Windows on it or Linux on it one at a time”.