Oracle's Sun buy: Ellison praises Solaris, snubs IBM

Oracle CEO says Sun's OS is 'by far the best Unix technology' available, also cites Java as a key component of acquisition

By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld, 04/20/09

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Oracle Corp. may have decided to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. because it was worth far more to the database market leader than it was to IBM. It's not a question of the price - at $7.4 billion, Oracle didn't agree to pay much more than what IBM reportedly was considering. But Oracle may have more use for Sun's technology than IBM ever did.

In explaining his decision to make the acquisition Monday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison boiled down Sun into a company of two key assets: Java and the Solaris operating system.

IBM wanted Java and especially Sun's enterprise customers. But many analysts didn't think that IBM, whose talks with Sun broke down two weeks ago, had any real interest in keeping Solaris alive on top of its own AIX version of Unix and Linux, which it broadly supports.

And if Ellison was going to thumb his nose at IBM, one way of doing that would be to praise the heck out of Solaris - which is what he did during a conference call Monday.

"The Solaris operating system is by far the best Unix technology available in the market," Ellison said. "That explains why more Oracle databases run on the Sun Sparc-Solaris platform than any other computer system."

If IBM had bought Sun, it would have created an opening to expand use of its DB2 database running on AIX at Oracle's expense.

But Ellison didn't make any long-term commitment to the Sparc hardware: he called Solaris "the heart of the business" for Sun. And while Oracle sees the acquisition as giving it the ability to sell ready-made systems out of the box - "complete and integrated computing systems from database to disk," as Ellison put it - that doesn't mean those systems have to be sold on Oracle-branded hardware.

Nonetheless, analysts think that even if Oracle doesn't see much of future in Sun's hardware platform, the road map for Sparc systems may well extend a decade or more.

Java's importance to Oracle is already apparent. Oracle is a major middleware vendor, and Ellison said that its Java-based Fusion Middleware technology is the fastest-growing part of its business.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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