Oracle is hiring 2,000 salespeople and engineers to sell not just software but hardware, now that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which was completed on Jan. 27, transforms it from a software company to a systems company. In a five-hour event, Oracle executives assured the IT industry it will accelerate the investment in Sun’s SPARC/Solaris server and storage hardware.

The number of new hires is "about twice as many people as we'll be laying off," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. "We're not cutting Sun to profitability, we're growing Sun to profitability," he said, adding that the company still intends that Sun will contribute at least $1.5 billion in operating profit in the first year after the deal closes.

Oracle President Charles Phillips and John Fowler, now Oracle executive vice president of hardware engineering and a former Sun executive, said that servers and storage devices acquired from Sun will form a foundation of Oracle’s plans to offer businesses a more tightly integrated and highly optimized set of solutions aimed at improving the performance of their applications.

Oracle has offerings in the database, applications and middleware arenas, and now adds servers, storage technology, operating systems and virtualization capabilities, Phillips said during the event, which is available for replay. Having all those layers in a single company, being worked on by thousands of engineers with the same goal, is something that no rivals can offer, he said.

"We want to take responsibility for the entire stack," Phillips said. "Instead of all the finger-pointing when something goes wrong, you'll have one company to call."

Oracle itself, Phillips said, offers products in OLTP, data warehousing, embedded database, middleware, CRM, human capital management, and enterprise performance management. To this list, Sun adds an enterprise OS, servers for UNIX and the Oracle database, enterprise tape storage, and Java.

The Oracle Exadata high-end data base and storage system developed jointly by Oracle and Sun 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 reiterated its plans to invest more than Sun could in the hardware business and challenge HP and IBM in the high-end of the server space. Overall, Oracle says it will boost its research and development spending from $2.8 billion to $4.3 billion.

Sun's brand will remain on the hardware systems as improvements will continue to be made to Sun’s M Series of systems - based on Fujitsu’s SPARC64 chip technology - and T Series, which are powered by Sun’s own UltraSPARC processors. Improvements in thread counts and memory are promised for the UltraSPARC chips. The company also plans on continuing to sell some of Sun's lower-cost servers that run on Linux or other operating systems.

Oracle executives also said they will continue to promote Sun software products such as MySQL, OpenOffice.org, and Web-development tools based on the Java programming language.

Phillips stressed Oracle's commitment to Java. "All our next-generation applications are written in Java. We have a vested interest to see that Java remains successful," Phillips said. JavaOne, the annual Java technical conference historically held in June, will continue but will instead be held as part of the Oracle OpenWorld Conference September 19-23 in San Francisco. It also is going global with plans for it to hit Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

MySQL, the open source database will become part of the company's open source global business unit and maintain its own sales force. "We're going to make MySQL better," said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle. MySQL will be integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager, Secure Backup, and Audit Vault technologies.

“We’ll do a better job at improving MySQL than has been done for the past five years," commented Ellison. "The goal is to make [MySQL] and Solaris technologically better because we can then make more money for the products and their support.”

In the cloud computing space, Oracle will offer a range of products for building clouds, including the Oracle WebLogic Server application server, Solaris containers, and Sun Oracle servers and storage. "With the merger between Sun and Oracle, Oracle will offer a comprehensive set of building blocks for managing and assembling public and private clouds," Screven said. However, he continued, "We're not going to be offering the Sun Cloud service."

OpenOffice.org will be managed as a separate unit within Sun and Oracle plans to deliver a version of the product called Oracle Cloud Office. The product will be aimed at corporate users and will have tight connections with some of Oracle’s business intelligence products.

There was mention of plans for Sun’s open source Web-based applications server, Glassfish. However, it appears that the more strategic product in that space will be Oracle’s WebLogic server, with Glassfish being positioned as a reference product for Java Enterprise Edition 6, according to Thomas Kurian, who oversees Oracle’s middleware and application products.

Support for both Oracle and Sun users will be available through the MyOracle Support portal, which will be operational in the next couple of months, the company said. Oracle's goal is to have a single point of contact for support customers, particularly for those customers with both Oracle and Sun products in their shop.

As part of its shift toward dealing more directly with customers, Oracle will take over Sun’s top 4,000 customers, selling them products and services through its direct sales force, Ellison said.

“We want to ensure that those users get a good return on their investment,” he said, “so we will use our technologies not just to build products for them but to deliver it to them as well.”

For Sun customers below the top 4,000, Oracle will rely on the Oracle and Sun reseller networks to be the main point of contact.

More Information

Oracle + Sun: Transforming the IT Industry - Webcast presentation replay. These on-demand sessions offer strategies for Sun's major product lines related to the merger, outlining Oracle's approach.

Overview and Frequently Asked Questions for the Developer Community - regarding Sun-Oracle merger

Oracle Plans for NetBeans IDE

Where Life Takes Me Next... - Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry [...read more...]

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