With  the fate of its proposed $7.4bn takeover of Sun Microsystems Inc still uncertain amid antitrust scrutiny, Oracle Corp. is moving ahead with a new Exadata machine incorporating both companies' technology, and snubbed Hewlett-Packard in the process.

The earlier version of the machine was built by Oracle and Hewlett-Packard  when it was introduced last year, marking the first time in Oracle's history that the company sold computer hardware.

The machines are a combination of servers, which carry out heavy computing chores, and database software, which companies use to store and retrieve information they've stored, such as payroll data. Oracle confirmed that it is no longer making database machines with HP.

Oracle's proposed takeover of Sun, being held up by European Union regulators, has touched off a fight for Sun's computer-server customers. Sun rivals HP and IBM are trying to lure business from Sun, raising concerns among customers about the future of Sun's hardware products under Oracle.

Sun's worldwide market share in servers stood at 10% in the latest quarter, down more than 1% from last year, according to data from research firm IDC. Oracle has promised to invest more deeply in Sun's products than Sun could do. Oracle has also said it will "dramatically improve" the performance of Sun's hardware by designing it to run better with Oracle's software.

The US Justice Department has approved the Oracle-Sun deal but EU regulators are concerned about Oracle's plans for Sun's MySQL software, an open-source database that competes with Oracle's proprietary database. If EU regulators find problems with the deal, one way forward  would be for Oracle to sell or spin off MySQL business.

Autonomy offers IDOL SPE
Autonomy built its business on pioneering the market for understanding unstructured data, and some 20,000 customers depend on Autonomy technology for a range of business applications. Now it is applying the same advanced technologies to transform the database market, by turning legacy RDBMSs into next-generation probabilistic inference engines that can understand "shades of gray."
   
Corporations are dependent on RDBMS technology to power literally every type of business software application. While databases perform operations, the software doesn't understand the meaning of the data itself and is limited to viewing the world as black or white.

Using advanced probabilistic methodologies, Autonomy delivers new levels of database processing intelligence, enabling the software to suggest results, even when an exact match doesn't exist in the database. This represents a radical shift in the intelligence businesses can gain from information, by
delivering ability to understand the "meaning" in the data in the billions of corporate databases in use today.
   
The self-learning solution, IDOL SPE  can automatically make connections in the data that would otherwise need to be interpreted by human beings. The solution analyses interactions, usage, and multiple datasets to spot patterns in structured data and make non-obvious predictions. Unlike business intelligence solutions that require building and maintaining complex cubes that operate outside the database, IDOL SPE brings probabilistic inference into existing databases.
  
As example, an airline can leverage IDOL SPE to improve online customer experience and increase sales. A customer searching for a flight from New York to San Francisco at a date and time when all flights are sold out will automatically be offered an alternative airport such as Oakland or San Jose, rather than returning "no results" to the customer's search.

IDOL SPE infers the result from patterns in the data and its usage without the need for scripts or geographic information.

"Autonomy was built on one fundamental technology, IDOL, that brought meaning to human friendly information," said Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. "IDOL SPE is our second fundamental technology and ushers the database market into the era of meaning-based computing. Organizations are now able to free data from rigid structures to deliver relevance and understanding that can impact literally every type of computing applicatio