Oracle Corporation had its F4Q09 earnings call today and the Exadata comments started right away with the earnings press release:

The Exadata Database Machine is well on its way to being the most successful new product launch in Oracle’s 30 year history,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Several of Teradata’s largest customers are performance testing – then buying – Oracle Exadata Database Machines. In a recent competitive benchmark, a Teradata machine took over six hours to process a query that our Exadata Database Machine ran in less than 30 minutes. They bought Exadata.

During the earnings call Larry Ellison discusses Exadata and the competition:

…I’m going to talk about Exadata again. I said last quarter that Exadata is shaping up to be our most exciting and successful new product introduction in Oracle’s 30 year history and [in the] last quarter Exadata continues to grow and win competitive deals in the marketplace against our three primarily competitors. It’s turning out that Teradata is our number one competitor…Netezza and IBM are kind of tied for second.

Ellison describes some of the Exadata sales from this quarter which include:

  • A well-known California SmartPhone and computer manufacturer (win vs. Netezza) who commented that Exadata ran about 100 times faster in some cases then their standard Oracle environment
  • Research in Motion
  • Amtrak
  • A large East Coast insurance company
  • Thomson Reuters
  • A Japanese telco (biggest Teradata customer in Japan) who benchmarked Exadata and found it to be dramatically faster then Teradata
  • Barclays Capital (UK)
  • A number of banks in Western Europe and Germany

Larry Ellison follows with:

It was just a great quarter for Exadata, a product that is relatively new to the marketplace that is persuading people to move from their existing environments because Exadata is faster and the hardware costs less.

In the Q&A Larry Ellison responds to John DiFucci on Exadata:

By the way every customer I mentioned and alluded to were actual sales. Now some of these, because the Exadata product is so new, quite often will install in kind of a try and buy situation, but I can’t think of a case where we installed the machine that they didn’t buy. So we’re winning these benchmarks. Sometimes we’re beating Teradata. I think in my quote, I said we’ve beat Teradata on one of the queries by 20 to one. So we think it’s a brand new technology, we think we’re a lot faster then the competition. The benchmarks are proving out with real customer data, we’re proving to be much faster then the competition. Every single deal I mentioned were cases where the customer bought the system. There are obviously other evaluations going on and we expect the Exadata sales to accelerate.