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

Sell OpenOffice to IBM

[markdowling]

Now that Lotus have integrated OpenOffice into Notes 8 Standard and are also pushing Symphony, they are the ones with the incentive to ensure the OO momentum is maintained (not to mention ODF).

remember, sun != peoplesoft

[damn_registrars]

In the case of Sun, you have a company that makes (some) useful and reliable products. In the case of peoplesoft, you have a company that makes an obscenely bloated, broken, overpriced software package that has caused havoc and pain across the continent. Peoplesoft was the most similar thing to Microsoft available for takeover for less money than the contents of Fort Knox, and Sun did to them what so many of us would love to do to Microsoft.

Re:remember, sun != peoplesoft

[MouseR]

Many PeopleSoft employees moved into our Montreal office.

As someone whose been through an Oracle acquisition, I can say that Oracle actually handles that nicely. It's a bit of a culture clash, coming from a small vertical market company, but they dont savagely trash acquisition content.

They do get rid of non-essential personnel but they give you a chance to move on to current products, and they not only support acquired products for many years, they also keep staff around to make sure these products aren't just backed by paperwork and a web page.

Re:No talk about Solaris

[rackserverdeals]

The day the sale was announced Sun/Oracle had a conference call where Larry Ellison said two of the main reasons they were buying Sun were Solaris and Java. Solaris was the best Unix technology out there he said.

Selling the hardware business to HP was part of a different deal in the bast where Oracle and HP were going to buy different parts of Sun but IBM blocked it according to the article.

Nothing in the recent sale, other than some bloggers speculation, indicates they will be selling off the hardware units.

Switching to Postgres

[ColeonyxOnline]

I talked to my manager today, he said we were going to use Postgres instead of MySQL for out next web project.

In his opinion, the latest stable release had poor support for stored procedures and now this acquisition puts further development into question. He wants to move everything out of MySQL at some point.

Since I have never used Postgres before, I couldn't comment on anything, but from my perspective, MySQL had been moving forward with their database. Even if the stored procedures were not on par with the other DB's out there, they would mature in time.

I was ready to speak up, until I thought about MySQL passing hands for the second time, talks about forks, and finally the developers leaving the company. All those things cannot be good short term, and long term will depend a lot on the parent company.

So for the time being, I think my manager is correct and I did not protest his decision.

Re:Sun Directory, Messaging Server, OpenSSO, etc.

[bunratty]

and Sun Grid Engine, VirtualBox, ...