Oracle, Fujitsu Partner on Unix to Battle IBM

TOKYO, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Fujitsu Ltd (T:6702) and Oracle Corp
(NASDAQ:ORCL) plan to jointly develop next-generation Unix servers and
expand their decades-old partnership to include a new
distribution agreement, the companies said on Wednesday, as they
battle to keep up with market leader IBM (NYSE:IBM).

The Nikkei Japanese business daily had earlier said Japan’s
largest IT vendor, Fujitsu, will update its SPARC64 processor and
combine it with Oracle’s operating system to create Unix servers
that are about six times faster than current versions.

The processing power of the Unix servers, used in banks and
other businesses, will be raised to 15 times that of today’s
models by around 2014, the paper reported.

The new servers are expected to go on sale worldwide in the
second half of 2012, the newspaper said, adding that aside from
the Unix business, Fujitsu has also obtained global sales rights
to Oracle’s database and other applications.
(Reporting by Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo and Swetha Gopinath in
Bangalore; Editing by Joseph Radford)