Oracle Top Execs Answer Sun Employee Questions

The Register writes "Sun invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall this Wednesday, where they took questions on what's coming. They said they'd be 'crazy' to close Java, that Oracle 'needs' MySQL, and all Sun's processors look appealing. They hedged on OpenOffice — Phillips said he couldn't comment on any product line — and on Sun's work in high-performance computing. Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services. As for who's staying and who's getting cut at Sun: Phillips said Oracle needs Sun, but warned 'tough decisions' will be coming. Don't forget, this is the company that couriered pink slips to the PeopleSoft staff it cut following that acquisition."

Comments

Here's praying...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that they don't decide to GPL Solaris. Really don't want to see my favorite OS pulled apart and canibalized to fuel the growing Linux hegemony. Let's keep some diversity and competition in the Unix market!

Uh Cloud?

[rackserverdeals]

Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services.

Uhm... That's one of the things Sun is doing with cloud computing that I don't think others are.

All the cloud stuff is, is virtualization and infrastructure. Jonathan Schwartz himself has said that if you're not comfortable putting your stuff on a public cloud they'll bring the cloud to you.

They've been doing cool stuff with their virtualization and provisioning systems.

Re:Uh Cloud?

[Twillerror]

Yes, exactly. I wish more people would speak to this side of "cloud" computing.

What we want is two have redundant "pools" of server and applications. Those pools usually run at 2 or more data centers.

We pull the plug on one data center and clients of those servers and application automatically switch. We have more apps, need more servers for a cluster, or more space we just add on to the thing in a fairly automated fashion.

I'd like this at the intranet level. We have lots of various legacy and web based apps that I want to be able to run in 2 datacenters.

When the system fails our internal network in conjunction with the "cloud" software will switch so one of the clouds takes over the same IPs.

Putting servers in public clouds is for startup web applications, the scientific community, some niche apps(like using Amazon s3 for clusterable storage) and maybe small businesses. No way in heck we are putting our emails and our documents up on someone else servers. Being a public company I don't even think we could with all the SOX crap.

How It Went Down

[sexconker]

"OMG I work in . will I get laid off?"

"No no, no one will be laid off. All of Sun is important to us."

2 months from now when everyone from Sun will be ancient history.

--Wanted to link that pic of the Iraq guy at the press conference, obviously lying, with his hands in a "simmer down" gesture, but I can't find it. Maybe it wasn't Iraq. I dunno. Someone find it.

Re:How It Went Down

[Clandestine_Blaze]

So you must concur that its fucking hell to install?

How am I supposed to refute an individual's anecdote? If you find something difficult, how do I deny your experience? As with the installation of any software that requires post-install tailoring to fit your business needs, YMMV.

Re:Plug the damn leaks already

[rackserverdeals]

Phillips said MySQL has reach in "incremental markets" such as start-ups that Oracle can't get to on its own.

Basically, there is a customer out there that won't buy your product because it's too expensive for example. Instead of losing them to a competitor, you get them to use another product of yours, for free or hopefully with a service contract. Either way, they haven't gone to a competitor.

Your not making the money you would have made had you sold your flagship product, but you weren't going to make that anyway. Might as well get something, with the potential for more later, than turn them away.

Re:Open Source NeWS!

[fm6]

What were they supposed to do with NeWS, continue developing it while the rest of the Unix community used X11? If they had, Sun's workstation business would have died about a decade earlier than it did.