Ellison Sheds Light On Sun’s Future Strategy

Officials with HP, who on 15 December announced that they are partnering with Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat in their Sun Complete Care program aimed at enticing Sun customers, said that in the 12 months up to 31 October, more than 350 Sun customers had made the move to HP.

Ellison said Oracle’s decision to focus Sun hardware on the high-end and in its unified data centre initiative will be a key differentiator for the hardware business going forward. It will be a high-margin business for Oracle, and a high-value one for its customers, who will not have to worry about integrating disparate components. Instead, they will have everything already tightly integrated.

“We think that’s what the computing business is going to look like for larger enterprises in the future,” he said.

It also will bring Oracle into direct competition with the likes of Cisco Systems, HP, Dell and IBM, all of which offer solutions in the burgeoning market for unified data centre solutions.

Ellison did not elaborate on the future of Sun’s UltraSPARC “Niagara” line of multithreaded processors, which are designed more for high-demand systems such as web servers, rather than for high-end systems.

Despite antitrust concerns from European regulators around Oracle’s owning of MySQL should it buy Sun, Oracle officials during the call were confident that the EC would approve the deal sometime in January. They also said they expect Sun to add $1.5 billion in profits to Oracle during the first full fiscal year after the deal is closed.

After two days of hearings before the European Commission on 11 and 12 December, Oracle officials issued a list of 10 commitments they said they will keep for five years regarding MySQL in an effort to assuage concerns from the EC, competitors and users of the open-source database technology.

Oracle President Safra Catz said that during the hearing, several customers and Oracle user groups testified in favour of the deal. She also noted that more than 60 Congressmen and the US Department of Justice also offered their support of the deal to the European regulators.