Oracle and Sun: The new IBM?

The blue suits are back. Maybe not literally — CEO Larry Ellison wore his trademark tailored suit and black turtleneck. But the vibe as Oracle laid out its plans on Wednesday for the finally captured Sun Microsystems was distinctly IBM, circa 1960.

Indeed, Ellison said, it’s “back to the future. Vertical integration delivers huge value to the customer. Our vision of 2010 is the same as IBM’s in 1960, to deliver a comprehensive integrated suite of technology. It made IBM the most important technology company in the world, and we kind of like that.”

[ InfoWorld’s Paul Krill outlines Oracle’s strategy for integrating Sun’s technology. | Relive the rise and fall of Sun Microsystems in InfoWorld’s slideshow. ]

Ellison was speaking to an audience of customers, partners, press, and analysts at Oracle’s Redwood Shores, Calif., campus, a day after the $7.4 billion acquisition closed. And as he spoke, I must confess that, yes, I felt sorry to see the end of Sun. It was a great, albeit flawed company. However, given Sun’s sad state, I’m convinced that Oracle’s takeover was the best outcome. And Ellison’s willingness to up R&D spending, keep on the vast majority of Sun’s employees, and find a reasonable niche for MySQL are evidence that Oracle may well be the good steward Sun so badly needs.

IBM in the cross-hairs Blue-suit nostalgia aside, it’s evident that IBM is very much the target as Oracle makes its debut as a hardware vendor. A parade of Oracle executives touted complete, hardware, middleware, and database products and single points of contact for customers.

A solid half-day of sometimes detailed presentations left me with three other important takeaways:

• Oracle has little interest in the commodity server business, although it will still sell some of Sun’s x86 servers. But it’s boosting R&D to $4.3 billion from $2.8 billion last year, and it’s spending more money on engineering as it looks for high-value-add products.
• Oracle’s skirmish with the EU over the future of MySQL has stung. The company took pains to say that the open source database will have its own sales force and development group.
• Oracle will not fire a large number of former Sun employees. Expect about 2,000 new hires at Oracle, against approximately 1,000 layoffs. Oracle execs were wearing big red-and-white “We’re Hiring” buttons, and Ellison delivered a tongue-lashing to journalists and analysts who spread rumors that the Sun workforce would be decimated.

Less significant, but still interesting on a day when Apple announced the hotly anticipated iPad, was Ellison’s declaration that Oracle has no intention of entering the consumer electronics business. “I’m not sure Oracle is the right company to take on Apple. We’re happy to do what we do well. Rather than telephones, we’ll make Java that runs on cell phones,” he said.

A strategy for a multipolar vendor world The newly enlarged Oracle takes its place in what’s becoming a multipolar enterprise universe. IBM and now Oracle provide large integrated stacks and hardware, while Cisco Systems is moving into the server business and is allied with EMC and EMC’s VMware subsidiary. Hewlett-Packard, in turn, is moving into Cisco’s territory.

In buying Sun, Oracle also acquires the Sparc microprocessor business, giving it the opportunity, as Ellison put it, “to sell an integrated product from the silicon all the way the application stack.”

Executives here sketched out a vague road map for upgrading Sun’s server processors. Oracle will release the third generation of Sun’s UltraSparc T processor later this year, with twice as many cores, better floating-point performance, and a larger cache, said Mike Splain, who was senior vice president of Sun’s microelectronics group.

Future chips will have new cores and higher clock frequencies, he said, though he didn’t give release dates for those products. Oracle will also update Sun’s M-series servers with faster chips in “the next 15 to 18 months,” Splain said.

MySQL’s future In the normal course of things, a relatively small company caught up in the maelstrom of a $7.4 billion acquisition wouldn’t get much attention. But the future of MySQL was a major issue as the European Union considered the merger, and a major worry for users and developers associated with the open source database provider.

All that worry ended up not scuttling the acquisition, but it still seems to be fresh in the minds of Oracle execs. At the Wednesday road map presentation, Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief software architect, said, “We will make MySQL part of the Oracle family.” MySQL will be part of Oracle’s open source business unit and have its own sales force and development group.

Still, that answer is unlikely to mollify committed opponents of the takeover. Florian Mueller, a longtime writer, developer, and activist in the open source world, held out hope that something, perhaps opposition from Russia, would derail the acquisition at the last minute. It didn’t, and he then told me, “MySQL will not disappear, but it will be limited forever, and the only real hope for effective competition in the database market will be Microsoft SQL Server. I have a development project of my own in which I’ll likely replace MySQL with SQL Server in the event of the closure of the acquistion.”

Screven also noted that OpenOffice, Sun’s free alternative to Microsoft Office, will live on as a unit within Oracle, and the annual JavaOne show will remain independent but will be held at the same time and the same place as OpenWorld: mid-September at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Ellison: He’s even cockier now As befitting a man who has completed some 60 acquisitions in the last six years, beaten back the EU, and humbled powerful rivals such as PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, and BEA, Ellison seemed even cockier than usual.

He gave a rhetorical back of the hand to developers of in-memory databases, VMware, and others, but he saved his most dismissive remarks for the current incarnation of IBM, whose database he ridiculed — and for those who think Oracle is now too big to succeed. “The idea you can be too big to innovate is just ludicrous,” he said.

Ellison, it seems, believes he is too big to fail. We’ll see. And we’ll see if my hopes that the acquistion will be an overall plus for the IT industry and Sun’s long-suffering employees are well founded.

Related stories

• Oracle’s ambitious plans for integrating Sun’s technology
• Oracle’s big bear hug for Java bodes really well
• Oracle hails Java but kills Sun Cloud
• The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems
• Sun’s Scott McNealy: ‘Thanks for a great 28 years’
• Oracle’s Ellison excited about Sun technologies

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This article, “Oracle and Sun: The new IBM?,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on Oracle and Java at InfoWorld.com.