Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff

An anonymous reader writes "There's been much speculation as to what Oracle plans to do with Sun once the all-but-certain acquisition is complete. According to separate reports on InfoWorld, Oracle has disclosed plans to continue investing in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. However, Larry Ellison has reportedly said that once the Sun acquisition is complete, Oracle will hire 2,000 new employees — more people than it expects to cut from the Sun workforce. Oracle will present its plans for Sun to the public Wednesday."

Comments

Re:Employee cuts

[PCM2]

I think in this case the Journal is mistaken. Ellison just talked about this issue minutes ago, and he castigated the press for reports the Oracle plans to lay off "half Sun's workforce" (or similar). He says Oracle plans no such thing, and in fact he will be hiring 2,000 new employees, which will be more than it plans to lay off as a result of this acquisition.

This is bad news for Sun hardware staff.

[Usagi_yo]

Sparc is dead (at least I hope so) as far as U.S development is concerned. Sun pissed away too much money developing Sparc chipsets post 1999/2001 -- when it became clear that X86 architecture was coming into its own. Sun should have stuck with AMD and explored more ways to make Enterprise versions of X86. Spending more R&D money in an ever shrinking niche market when off the shelf components were making leaps and bounds was not a good business decision. I certainly hope Oracle doesn't intend on going down this proven money sink

hole.

M4/M5 and DC series are almost exclusively designed by Fujitsu, except for some odds and ends "thrown as a bone" to Sun. Things like Power supply Specifications, choice of which DVD drives and Disk Drives to use, non-active component boards, and *some* U.S agency compliance responsibilities made me ..... uhhh, Sun Engineers feel like we were becoming sustaining Engineering people for a product we had little to absolutely no design control or responsibility for. Oh yea, well we did get to design some power cords. Woo Hoo! Power cord engineering is what I ... uh, they wanted to do after 15 years of Systems Engineering experience.

I don't know how it's going to work for Sun Hardware Engineering when under Oracle. I think they are smart people and have a different perspective then what was developed at Sun from the bubble burst to now -- But I hope they have something synergistic in mind, rather then Bifurcated product lines. I would like to see Database Transactional off-load processors down to the I/O level .. such as TCP offload engines and specialty I/O designed to deliver transactional data directly to the clients.

As for sideline products, I expect things like Java to be spun off and sold to interested 3rd parties, while I believe Solaris will be kept and well supported for a good while yet as probably government dictated conditions of the merger. Governments don't like when their support disapears over night for things they intended on using for a long time. Open office is a popular alternative to the expensive and bloated MS Office so I think Oracle will keep Staroffice and try to make something of it. Mysql will be supported in name only, and don't be surprised if starts to look more and more like Oracle.