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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."
...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!
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).
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
"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.
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
Sun Employees: What is our status when Oracle takes over?
Oracle President: See Figure 1
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
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.
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.
and Sun Grid Engine, VirtualBox, ...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Dude, even married people dream of getting laid someday.
Oracle is much larger than Sun in virtually every way, and is much more than just a database company. Anyone who thinks Oracle is only about databases hasn't done their homework.
Furthermore, Oracle buying Sun makes much more sense than IBM buying Sun. Oracle wants to offer the full package to their customers--from servers and storage, to middleware and database software. IBM already has most (if not all) of those bases covered, so their would have been a significant amount of overlap. The parts of Sun that survive the acquisition will turn Oracle into a force to be reckoned with, for better or worse.
-William Brendel