ReadWriteEnterprise

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been in love with the idea of "all-in-one" and "out-of-the-box" since before the turn of the century. In Matthew Symonds' portrait of Ellison entitled Softwar, he noted how four years prior to the book's publication, Ellison had had an epiphany: the software and hardware industries should never have separated. "If Detroit ran like Silicon Valley," the CEO told the author, "no one would sell cars, just parts."

But Ellison was lacking two key ingredients, which he doesn't lack now. One was Sun Microsystems, whose high-end UltraSPARC processor-based systems are credited with contributing to the very positive growth for Oracle reported just yesterday. The other key ingredient was former HP CEO, now Oracle President, Mark Hurd. Today, they've all come together to produce what Ellison had always envisioned: the Oracle database box.