The Ed Zander Interview at the Churchill Club September 29, 2009,
Volume 139, Issue 5
We are keeping everything! We are keeping tape, we are keeping storage, we are keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology, we're going to increase the investment in it.
-- Larry Ellison, Oracle
Anyone interested in the Sun-Oracle merger should take an hour and a half to watch the replay of former Motorola and Sun executive Ed Zander's interview of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, which took place September 21 before a gathering of industry dignitaries at the Churchill Club in San Jose, Calif. Ellison discusses his plans for Oracle and the various Sun technologies soon to be acquired when, or if, the European Union approves the buyout.
Some interesting things said by Ellison during the interview:
"We are not going into the hardware business. We have no interest in the hardware business. We have a deep interest in the systems business."
"We have no interest in competing with Dell, (and the Windows on X86 market...) we're very interested in running airline reservation systems, and we're very interesting in running banking systems, and telecommunications systems, and that requires both hardware and software."
"We are keeping everything! We are keeping tape, we are keeping storage, we are keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology, we're going to increase the investment in it."
"...Solaris is overwhelmingly the best open systems operating system on the planet."
"MySQL and Oracle do not complete... at all!"
"I'd like IBM to explain what they meant when they said they took 250 customers away from Sun. I don't think there is a single example of any Sun customer who's replaced all of their machines with IBM computers."
"Be clear Solaris is way better than AIX.
"Sun machines run faster than IBM machines and cost less"
"We wanna get it done to save as many jobs as we can!" (regarding closing the Sun acquisition)
"We are not going to spin anything off." (speaking about the pressure from the EU to potentially spin off MySQL)
"We've been treating customers like computer hobbyists; go buy an operating systems, go buy some network switches and routers and...We've been selling components." (Speaking of the industry as a whole.)
"Cloud? ... I mean, cloud is water vapor. ... My objection to cloud computing is the fact that cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past of computing ... it's not water vapor, all it is is a computer attached to a network ... what do you think Google runs on - water vapor? ... its databases and operating systems and memory and microprocessors and the Internet."
"IBM is who we're targeting, it's who we feel we need to compete with to be successful ourselves."
"We're a big supporter of Linux, but the fact is that Solaris is just a much more mature OS, it's just a fact. We became a big supporter of Linux years ago because it ran on smaller and cheaper X86 processors and Solaris did not, we had no choice. ... So we are a supporter of Linux, but Solaris is a more mature operating system designed for bigger systems. We support both."
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We are keeping everything! We are keeping tape, we are keeping storage, we are keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology, we're going to increase the investment in it. 
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Just What Did Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Say
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