Oracle Won't Abandon SPARC, Says Ellison

fm6 writes "When the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems was announced, it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun's software technology, and would sell or discontinue all its hardware businesses. Larry Ellison, in an interview just posted on the Oracle web site, says that's not what's going to happen. In particular, SPARC isn't going anywhere (PDF): 'Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.'"

Comments

Are You Really Prepared for the Hardware Market?

[eldavojohn]

I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?

Re:Are You Really Prepared for the Hardware Market

[phantomfive]

Sun makes (made) awesome technology. They built things no one else could build. They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.

Oracle, on the other hand, is extremely good and marketing. They are especially good at marketing to business. They are also good at knowing what businesses want (or alternately, making business people want what they have). I don't like Oracle, but I have to say this may be the best thing that's happened for Sparc in a long time.

Re:My theory why: multiprocessors

[Unoti]

People have been saying for years that we're about to reach the end of the line in terms of Moore's law. So far they've all been proven wrong, and scaling continues unabated.

I don't know about unabated. It's been progressing, but we hit a bump, and all the sudden it was all about multicore and such rather than just continuing to double the clock speed every year or two.

Look at the palpable hump in this graph.

Why abandon SPARC?

[makinsky]

During their initial press release Larry Ellison said: "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves..."

Doesn't that sound like they did actually want to keep all the Sun's hardware business including SPARC from the very beginning?

You guys aren't getting it.

[juuri]

"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.

Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."

Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.

Re:Are You Really Prepared for the Hardware Market

[rackserverdeals]

I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?

Interesting choice of the word blitzkrieg to characterize the marketing campaign. I think it's very appropriate.

Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy, disregarding the flanks and trying to avoid the strong points.

It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks.

Lets not forget who won the war.

IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business.