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Oracle guarantees that Sun will shine on
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Oracle guarantees that Sun will shine on
A new Dawn of .......a Solaris
McNealy, in turn, did his part to spread faith in the acquisition by reiterating claims made by Ellison in the proceeding months.
“We`re not a capital equipment with big fabs. We are all about innovation. You have to keep inventing. You have to keep creating," said McNealy.
"We did that with a lot of great people. We were one of the world`s top R&D companies. Think about putting Oracle`s large R&D budget with our R&D budget, and you have one of the biggest R&D budgets of all time."
He`s right: Sun spent over a billion dollars a year on pure R&D. Its problem was that little if any of it yielded new revenues, let alone profits.
Then McNealy threw out some numbers: “There are over 216,000 SPARC servers out in the market today. Seven million processors shipped this decade. We went and asked Oracle what are their plans. They are going to spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now.
"What about Solaris? This is the No. 1 platform for Oracle. We`re everywhere; we have OEM agreements with Dell, IBM, Fujitsu Siemens and [Hewlett-Packard]. Don`t take our word for it. Larry [Ellison] says we`re going to spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now, so feel comfortable about that innovation."
What about MySQL?
Perhaps the most interesting area of discussion during the keynote came around MySQL. The US$1 billion purchase of MySQL by Sun has caused the European Union to hold up the Oracle-Sun merger for fear of antitrust issues.
McNealy addressed those issues in his keynote speech. “The one I hear a lot about is MySQL. Is it going to get clobbered? I don`t think so," he said.
"Larry has said it doesn`t compete with the Oracle database, which is true. This competes with Microsoft. This competes with Microsoft SQL Server. It doesn`t compete with Oracle or DB2."
He then pointed out that Oracle had previously purchased Innobase, which makes one of the most popular transaction engines for MySQL users, InnoDB.
“We shouldn`t be worried,” said McNealy. “MySQL is GPL. If Oracle messes with it, the world will fork. There`s not quite an issue here; we`re not sure why it`s held up, but we`re working with the authorities to make sure they understand that.”
Java was another hot topic, and McNealy then brought out James Gosling, vice president and the father of Java, on stage to discuss the future of the programming language and ecosystem.
The pair bantered about how they now will have a huge collective pool of programmers when Oracle and Sun mix their developer networks.
“I`ve never worked for a software company, so I am looking forward to it,” said Gosling.
“It won`t be a software company after we get done with them,” replied McNealy.
Ellison then came on stage and went over, point by point, an ad that Oracle released in August, which promised monetary commitments to Sun`s existing product lines. He added a new line to the previous four-point list, this one promising that MySQL would also receive more money for development and research.
“I believe our shareholders made an exciting decision given the choices that they had," said McNealy. "I am counting on Larry and the Oracle team to take very good care of a very important legacy of mine, and of the founders, and the employees and shareholders of Sun Microsystems."
McNealy said Sun had “kicked butt, had fun, didn`t cheat, loved our customers, and we changed computing forever.” Engrave that on Sun`s tombstone.
Source:
http://www.sdtimes.com/ORACLE_GUARANTEES_THAT_SUN_WILL_SHINE_ON/By_Alex_Handy/Ab
