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Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on

Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison offer reassurances at the OpenWorld conference that Oracle will be good for all of Sun technologies after the merger

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 10/14/09

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Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison both took the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009 conference Sunday evening to offer reassurances that Sun technologies will not go away should Oracle complete its planned acquisition of Sun.

From Java to the Solaris OS to the Sparc CPU platform and Sun storage technologies, Oracle will be good for all of them, the executives stressed at the San Francisco event. As a matter of fact, combining Sun's research and development budget with Sun's presents "one of the great R&D opportunities of all time," McNealy said.

[ Find out why some user are nervous about Oracle owning MySQL. | Relive Sun's storied history in InfoWorld's slideshow "The rise and fall of Sun Microsystems." ]

Oracle, for example, intends to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now, he said. "That's a good sign for Sparc innovation," McNealy said.

"You look at the core technologies that we're developing: They're going to find a nice home in this next chapter," he said, referring to merger.

Ellison, for his part, took exception with IBM for suggesting Oracle was not committed to Sun's wares, particularly Sun hardware. "We're looking forward to competing with IBM in the systems [business] and we think the combination of Sun and Oracle [is] well-equipped to compete successfully against the giant," Ellison said.

Ellison said he would give $10 million to anyone -- any major company or enterprise -- whose existing database application would not run at least twice as fast on Sun gear. The challenge would be part of a new ad campaign. But he acknowledged Oracle recently was fined $10,000 for running a recent ad comparing Sun and Oracle to IBM, in which the benchmark evidence had not yet been documented. His explanation cited overzealousness on Oracle's part.

"If IBM wants to compete, we're happy to compete and we made a series of commitments," Ellison said. Solaris, meanwhile, is the leading enterprise OS and the leading OS for running the Oracle database, he said.

"We said we're not selling the hardware business and we think Sparc is a fantastic technology. And with a little more investment, it could be even better," said Ellison.

Oracle also plans to increase its investment in the open source MySQL database, Ellison said. He added that Oracle already has continued to invest in the Innobase technology it acquired that serves as the transaction engine in MySQL. There had been speculation that Oracle bought Innobase "to kill it," but that has not happened at all, Ellison stressed. MySQL currently is owned by Sun.

IBM had been a rumored suitor for Sun prior to Oracle forging a deal to buy the company nearly six months ago. The sale remains held up by the European Union, which is concerned over commercial database giant Oracle owning MySQL. Recently, Ellison said Sun has been losing $100 million a month waiting for the sale to close. McNealy said efforts to close the sale were proceeding with authorities.

To argue on behalf of Oracle's commitment to Java, McNealy brought Sun vice president James Gosling, considered the father of Java, onstage. Oracle's product mix features Java, and the company has participated in numerous Java Specification Requests (JSR), Gosling said. The JSR process is used to submit modifications to the platform to the community at large.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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