"Okay—the former world champion, the P7—the P7's a good product—what can I say? IBM has good products. And they've got an excellent chip, and the guys that our Sparc guys compare themselves to are the IBM Power PC guys.

"Nonetheless," Ellison said, "we beat them 3 to 1 in throughput, with 30 million versus 10 million; better price-performance; and the most shocking number of all is response time that's 3 times better. Our response time was less than half a second for these 30 million transactions—average response time was less than half a second. That's an amazing number."

Then Ellison showed side-by-side images of the Oracle machine and the HP machine, with the latter having the red starburst-thingy over it but this time emblazoned with the word "Destroyed!"

"Way better than HP," he said. "The amazing thing is they [HP] take up 24 times as much floor space with their computer as we do, [and] consume vastly more power."

And then, in case anybody missed his first two pledges of the new dynamic between Oracle and HP, Ellison reiterated Oracle's stance toward HP, and if this is what an "alliance" is all about, then I'm going to reconsider my enemies:

"Again, we think they're vulnerable, and we're going after them," Ellison said. "We're over seven times faster, dramatically better cost-performance, and in terms of energy consumption and floor space and all of those things, we're leagues in front of HP."

And earlier in his remarks, Ellison deliberately left HP off the list of hardware partners working with Oracle on new high end systems for which Oracle will offer "gold-standard" service:

"So a new level of support and testing that's backed up by a new service-level agreement based on a gold standard—and I like the term 'gold standard' configurations—and by the way, we're gonna do that—Sun/Oracle's gonna do that—and we expect to announce partners that will have their own gold-standard configurations," Ellison said.

"This is not merely Sun/Oracle—we're gonna have partners like IBM and Dell and Cisco that join in and create those gold-standard configurations that we jointly test all of our new releases against, all of our bug fixes against, so that customers have choice in terms of the hardware and software they use that's thoroughly tested. So we think choice is very important."

Yes, choice is very important—unless, it seems, you want to choose HP.

So: is the HP-Oracle alliance officially dead? Well, if it's not, then based on Larry Ellison's comments, it's the new posterboy for the zombie brotherhood.

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Heightened Attacks On HP Doom Alliance Global CIO: Larry Ellison Puts HP In Crosshairs Via Slap At New CEO Global CIO: In Larry Ellison's Legal Battle With SAP, HP Is Collateral Damage Global CIO: HP CEO Apotheker Has Deep Expertise But Checkered History Global CIO: Are HP And SAP Perfect Match Or Train Wreck? Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's Missing Link Is Analytics Global CIO: Burying Mark Hurd: Hewlett-Packard And Its Future Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard's CEO: The Top 10 Challenges Global CIO: Has HP Found Its Next CEO? Global CIO: Larry Ellison And Mark Hurd: The Job Interview Global CIO: Resurrecting Mark Hurd: Larry Ellison's War With IBM Global CIO: Gunning For IBM And Oracle, HP Plans Optimized Systems Blitz Global CIO: HP's $130-Billion Gamble Global CIO: An Open Letter To HP CEO Leo Apotheker Global CIO: Top 10 Most Influential Vendors, Part 2 (Microsoft And HP?) Global CIO: Can HP's CEO Survive? The Board Talks It Over Global CIO: HP CEO Leo Apotheker's Agenda: What Will He Do First? Global CIO: IBM Details Raids On Customers From HP And Oracle Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit.

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