Highlighting the fact that Oracle has posted strong results for the second-quarter, comfortably beating the Wall Street estimates, CEO Larry Ellison said in a statement on Thursday that his company is making notable advancements to compete with rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the high-end server market.

Noting that the strong second quarter for the company chiefly resulted from sales of new software licenses and database/middleware products, Ellison chiefly stressed the company’s progress in terms of hardware. During a recent conference call, Ellison used Oracles’ Exadata database machine to take swipes at HP and IBM.

Essentially a pre-packaged combination of hardware and software, Exadata is touted by Oracle as the ultimate option for cloud computing and grids, which are extensively used in areas like oil and gas exploration. Apparently, that Oracle’s promotion of Exadata is yielding the desired results; with Macquarie Securities’ analyst Brad Zelnick remarking in a Friday-released note that “Exadata continues to gain momentum.”

Meanwhile, revealing that Oracle’s Exadata channel is currently at $2 billion, up from a year back’s $1.5 billion, Ellison said: “In data warehousing it's not unusual for our Exadata to be 10 times faster than the competition. We think that Exadata will be a nice turbo-charger for our overall database business.”

Terming HP’s high-end servers as “slow and expensive” and adding that HP is particularly susceptible to market share losses, the Oracle chief projected a notable leap in Exadata sales in the third quarter.