X
Business

Oracle explains Sun to Aussies in April

After laying out its plans for its newly completed Sun acquisition to a worldwide audience via webcast, Oracle now intends to hold international tours explaining the integration of the companies to customers and partners.
Written by Stephen Shankland, Contributor and  Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

After laying out plans for its newly completed Sun acquisition to a worldwide audience via webcast, Oracle now intends to hold international tours explaining the integration of the companies to customers and partners.

Oracle president Charles Phillips

Oracle president
Charles Phillips

(Credit: Oracle)

The sessions, which will talk up Oracle's plans for integrated software and hardware, will start down under in Canberra on 16 April, move to New Zealand, then return to Australia for Melbourne and Sydney on 28 and 30 April respectively.

An Oracle spokesperson could not say who from the global headquarters would make their way down to take part in the discussions.

Oracle announced the completion of its acquisition on 27 January, with CEO Larry Ellison and president Charles Phillips (who has been in the news lately because of a jilted lover who allegedly paid for billboards to publicise their relationship) outlining the company's plans.

These plans included hiring 2000 employees, according to Ellison, although about half that number would be laid off as well. The Australian spokesperson declined to comment on what that meant for the headcount in this country.

Ellison also said that Oracle would start selling directly to certain customers, although which customers that would mean in its international business was unsure.

Phillips said that Oracle wanted to use its newly acquired hardware portfolio to recreate the "reliable environment" IBM provided in the 1960's — when it sold hardware, software and services in packages — but as an open systems platform. With the Sun purchase, Oracle has now become a major competitor to IBM in the hardware market.

Oracle wanted the enlarged portfolio to serve customers looking for complete, integrated and engineered systems, following years of having to build systems "in a very manual, labour-intensive way".

"You'd select a lot of components from different suppliers, we'd deliver those components to you, then you'd hire a lot of integrators to come in and hopefully get them to work together and find some combination that seems to work," Phillips said, describing that situation as "very unpredictable, very unreliable [and with a] lack of security".

Phillips said "no other company" can offer storage, servers, middleware, database, applications and management tools, as Oracle now can thanks to the Sun merger.

Amongst its strategy announcements Oracle said it will "broaden and accelerate" its Java investment and increase its commitment to the development platform's community. The company said it will spend more than Sun did on the Unix-based Solaris operating system, adding that it remains "fully committed" to the Linux operating system.

Oracle also plans to spend more than Sun did on developing MySQL, which it intends to add to its existing suite of database products.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager and Sun Ops Centre system management products are to be combined, and Oracle will continue to invest in Sun's StorageTek tape portfolio. Investment in the Sparc and x86 architectures will continue.

The company said it plans to continue Sun's "desktop to datacentre virtualisation strategy", and expects to continue Sun's desktop virtualisation products, namely VDI, Secure Global Desktop, Sun Ray and Virtualbox.

Oracle will also continue developing and supporting OpenOffice, and will offer a commercial licence option for the productivity suite. In addition, it will continue Sun's industry-specific offerings for the communications, financial services, government, education, energy, healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, retail trade and transportation sectors.

The company said it "plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition specifications", and promised to continue offering NetBeans as a Java developer tool alongside its existing JDeveloper and Enterprise Pack for Eclipse products.

Sun's Identity Management and SOA products are expected to be integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, Oracle said.

Stephen Shankland from ZDNet.co.uk contribued to this article. Click here to see his complete article.

Carousel image by Peter Kaminsky, CC2.0.

Editorial standards