By teaming up with its Silicon Valley neighbours, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, two of the biggest makers of powerful Unix servers, Oracle's new data centres are able to supply the gamut of hardware and services.
That software "glue" means that IBM can use its dominance in the mainframe arena to win x86 and Unix customers away from competitors like Hewlett-Packard, which recently declared that it sells more x86 servers than any other vendor, and Dell.