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Oracle leaves Sun users looking for more info about its plans
Oracle Corp.'s announcement last week that it plans to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. raised questions about, well, almost every aspect of the blockbuster deal that would unite two Silicon Valley icons. The only sure bets are that Oracle sees benefits in acquiring Java and the Solaris operating system -- the only two Sun technologies mentioned as part of the announcement -- and that thousands of additional Sun workers are likely to be laid off in order to meet Oracle's ambitious profit goals.
It's unclear, though, what will happen to the Java Community Process and Sun's other open-source technologies, such as the MySQL database. The same goes for the Sun-dominated OpenOffice.org application suite and its Sun-owned commercial cousin, StarOffice. Whether Oracle really intends to become a full-fledged hardware vendor and chip developer is also uncertain. Another question on the minds of Sun customers is how the deal with affect their service and support.
Microsoft Corp. has had few critics more vociferious than Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. So with Oracle planning to acquire Sun, Microsoft should be worried, right? If Oracle retools itself as a full-fledged systems vendor, as Ellison suggested that it might, hardware makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. might cozy up more with Microsoft as a business partner.
HP and Oracle teamed up last year to roll out the jointly branded Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server, which combine Oracle's software and HP's ProLiant servers. Oracle is selling the systems, while HP handles delivery and services the hardware.
But Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in a research note last week that HP "is likely to push alternatives to [Oracle] when possible, given that they are now direct competitors in the hardware space."
"The hardware business is king [for server vendors], and anything that threatens that becomes your mortal enemy," noted Miko Matsumura, a former Sun executive who is deputy chief technology officer at Software AG. Some analysts expect Oracle to sell Sun's hardware business to a company such as Fujitsu Ltd., which makes Sparc-based systems. But Ellison, while not divulging any Sparc-related plans, said that the acquisition could enable Oracle to develop fully integrated systems.
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