By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
January 29, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The thing that Oracle Corp. wanted to make clear Wednesday, its first full day as the owner of Sun Microsystems, is that it’s time to stop worrying about the future of Sun.

There was probably no other message that mattered more for Oracle about Sun, which has lingered in Never-Never land since this merger was announced last April. But big changes are ahead.

Sun’s old way of relying on partners and resellers to sell to its largest customers will instead change to direct support model, and more broadly, a build-to-order system backed by a new army of sales representatives that Oracle is hiring.

There will remain broad support for many of Sun’s core technologies, UltraSparc, Solaris, Java, and its middleware applications, something Oracle officials worked to make clear. But Sun’s product catalog will be substantially scaled back and much still needs be revealed here.

What will emerge from the combined companies will be highly integrated systems with Sun and Oracle technologies. The Oracle Exadata high-end data base and storage system developed jointly by these two companies is a preview of what’s ahead. In its new delivery system, built-in support technology will get a lot attention, with plans for “collectors,” systems that provide feedback on system configuration and help manage changes.

Oracle says it will boost its research and development spending from $2.8 billion to $4.3 billion.

One longtime Sun customer, Daniel Grim, CTO at the University of Delaware, said one message he heard is that Oracle wants a more intimate relationship with customers and “if they do that it will be good,” he said.

But Grim also wants to see some product commitments, including stronger support for Solaris on x86, which he said right now is all but unsupported.

“It gives me hope, but I’m not sure that I’ve heard enough yet that I’m reassured,” said Grim of the merged companies.

In a nutshell, this was Sun’s problem going into today. Sun’s market share in worldwide server factory revenue went in one year from 9.5% to 7.5%, according to IDC’s third quarter report, its most recent report. But now Sun’s server product line has Oracle selling and backing its systems and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, is promising a fast comeback for Sun.

Some of what Oracle said Wednesday about its plans was a little over the top. In talking about the centralization of support, Charles Phillips, Oracle’s president. “We want the best paid reps in the industry,” he said. “We want the Derek Jeter,” he said, referring to the Yankees baseball star.

“To the administration that wants a jobs program this is a company that is creating jobs, 2000 jobs today,” said Phillips, who did not mention the layoffs that have already happened at Sun, and others that may occur as the merger is implemented. Oracle has not said how many be jobs may be lost.

Analysts will be watching carefully to see how Oracle, fundamentally a software company, manages a hardware firm.

“A software company running a hardware company has, to my knowledge, never been done successfully, said Rob Enderle, an independent IT analyst. “If anyone can do it Oracle would be on my shortlist, but on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being most difficult, this is definately an 11.”

Oracle officials, in seems, are putting a lot emphasis on developing Sun’s core technologies, improving its UltraSparc chips, increasing their thread count and memory, and keeping Solaris as its enterprise operating system of choice.

The Sun’s Solaris strategy and its open sourcing of this operating system has helped to, perhaps, give confidence about its future. Hewlett-Packard has become a major seller of Solaris x86 systems, but it does not sell Solaris on its Itanium systems, which support Unix rival HP -UX. IBM has Power and AIX, but the Unix market for all these vendors - while still large - has been declining as x86 system chips increase in their capability.

But the immediate steps for Oracle, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT , is for Oracle “to keep the vast majority of Sun customers on board and basically let them know they haven’t been forgotten.”

Possibly Related Posts:

• Philippine BPO industry hails Senate’s passage of cybercrime bill
• You don’t deserve more time, says judge to Facebook, Google: report
• Oracle asks for retrial against SAP in TomorrowNow case
• Microsoft opens C++ extension for other compilers
• Prepare Your Business for Facebook Mobile Ads

 Print This Post