back to article Oracle brass coax Sun troops with tough love

Oracle's senior management has expressed its love for Sun Microsystems' software and hardware but warned tough decisions are coming on what people and products stay. President Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven have committed to keeping Java open and to not killing MySQL. They also mocked the idea …

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  1. Chris Carline
    Joke

    And obviously...

    "In 12 years of marriage, I have never punched my wife in the face," I added.

    Not yet at least! ®

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Meanwhile, Schwartz butters 'em up

    for the kill:

    http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/21/suns-schwartz-tries-to-reassure-his-troops-in-email/

  3. Clinton
    Gates Horns

    OpenOffice lags Microsoft Office?

    "With an email and productivity offering of its own - and given OpenOffice lags Microsoft Office by years - the omens for OpenOffice are not good, even though - Schwartz claimed - "the point's not lost on Oracle we are adding three million users a week.""

    Exactly how does OpenOffice.org lag years behind Microsoft Office? It doesn't have a gimicy interface? I doesn't support the [non]-standard OpenXML which Microsoft themselves don't even support? OpenOffice.org has even done a great job porting over proprietary MSOffice crap.

  4. Gerry

    Open Office

    What do you mean "years behind"?

    If you mean: years away from replicating everything the Microsoft does, then possibly. If however you mean years away from being as capable as Microsoft then I think you are busking.

    In any event, discussing the fate of OOo does sound a little like troll bait as Oracle haven't publicised a decision about anything yet (by your own hand) and Novell (I know, I know) also support it.

    Of course, for those that care about Free Software, despite the unnecessary heaps of derision that have been piled upon it, KOffice2 is coming along really nicely, and while they have not wasted any time developing compatibility with the ever fluid file formats, it doesn't mean that it couldn't happen.

    And then you'll all have a lightweight cross-platform fully integrated office suite, with common UI and actions between components. And that will be years ahead of anything. Take a look at what's going on.

  5. TeeCee Gold badge

    Oh dear.

    "In 55 acquisitions, we have never spun off anything,"

    So that's shutdown and redundancies pencilled in for the Hardware side come the next "focus on our core business" moment then.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Anyone seen Matt B?

    Matt, tell me again about the hardware selloff? Tell me again about how much of a deal HP will get when Oracle sells off all the hardware to HP?

    Matt, tell me once more about HP eating up the old Sparc accounts with the newfound hardware buisness.

    Or should we follow your spouting tendencies and assume Oracle is about to take serious slices of HP's market share? Ding Ding, Itanic just hit an Oracle sized Iceberg!

    "Phillips and Screven also attempted to re-assure employees that Oracle's not about to sell of the hardware business" & "we needed to be comfortable with the fact these were hardware platforms, systems, that we were going to keep selling and developing...we are very comfortable."

    Thats not really sounding like a sell off to anyone except you it seems.

    Matt oh matt oh matt.... I'll try to get you some custard, makes Humble pie taste great...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Open Office

    "With an email and productivity offering of its own..."

    Eh? Oracle has email, calendar & collaboration SERVER products but it doesn't have anything for a desktop office suite. Even the Oracle mail client was binned years ago. Yes there's web based Mail and Calendar apps, but that's not an office suite, it's not google docs or anything.

    Given that most Oracle employees are still running MS Office 2000 because Oracle won't pay the extra to MS for Office 2007, I'd bet Open Office has a great future. Oracle also has good internal support for Linux desktops for those employees that choose to use it - the Oracle internal desktop Linux build includes Open Office. Maybe Oracle might ramp down it's internal use of MS Windows / MS Office on the desktop altogether after this. You never know...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Re: Anyone seen Matt B?

    "Matt, tell me again about the hardware selloff? Tell me again about how much of a deal HP will get when Oracle sells off all the hardware to HP?"

    Heh. Matt thought Itanium had more potential than SPARC, for which we only need to ask SGI how that turned out. It's true that Oracle could ditch SPARC and leave Fujitsu as the main proponent, but that would be as stupid as HP/Compaq buying and then ditching Alpha and large swathes of DEC technology to focus on their own mediocre offerings.

    But then HP's strategy is gold, according to Matt. Wonder who he's cheerleading for...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Run for the hills

    Get your wallets out I am hearing all Sun maintenance costs will be increased 50% as they cash cow most of Sun's products. When you rep calls you to about the price increase with NO added value, call your IBM rep.

    Remember when Oracle bought Digital's rdb then raised maintenance 100% to make them move to Oracle's db? Same scenario.

    Last summer Oracle increased their own prices 20%-50%.

  10. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Alert

    OpenOffice lagging?

    Oh I see, Open Office devs haven't quite got the hang of putting a full blown, feature rich, high-level language into an office suite so the user can quite happily blow their metaphorical foot off whenever they open a bloody spreadsheet!

    I use Ubuntu and OSX and OO is the only thing that works identically across both systems. I bought Mac MS/Office last year and quite frankly it is atrocious, I am only glad my wife got it dirt-cheap through her college's student discount scheme and I didn't have to pay full whack for it!

  11. David Halko
    Happy

    It seems SUN hardware is here to stay with Oracle

    This quote from Screven says it all, "When we were considering the acquisition we studied the processor lines and benchmarked things - we needed to be comfortable with the fact these were hardware platforms, systems, that we were going to keep selling and developing...we are very comfortable."

    I guess the less reasonable people posting comments about a sell-off were wrong (as usual) - just typical examples of FUD without rational thought.

  12. David Halko
    Flame

    @Anon: Run For the Hills...

    Anonymous Coward states, "When you rep calls you to about the price increase with NO added value, call your IBM rep."

    When IBM purchased a supplier of server agents, the price went from $50 in small lots to $600 in small quantities (under IBM)!

    IBM is no cheap deal, although they have some excellent hardware and software.

  13. zvonr

    Interesting info

    Oracle cannot sell the hardware business if they want to reach what they promised their investors.... the hardware business is revenue is significant...

    now oracle said:

    "When we were considering the acquisition we studied the processor lines and benchmarked things"

    I am curious if they benchmarked the Rock CPU, opensolaris gets fixes for those systems, so those systems seem to be alive ....

    this quarter must look really bad if sun had to sell itself...

  14. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: Humble pie and other Sunshiner fantasies.

    Oh, did I miss the bit where ANYONE at Oracle stood up and committed to Rock? Or even more of the current UltraSPANKed or Niagara kit? The storage kit maybe? Nope, not even Galaxy. In fact, Oracle have very carefully NOT committed - despite continual requests for clarification - to anything other than Slowaris, Java and MySQL. I guess you'd better put that humble pie on hold, you're probably going to be choking on it soon.

    As for zvonr's childish belief that Oracle can't sell the Sun hardware business because "revenue is significant" - that revenue is negative. Sun's hardware business is the rabid four-hundred pound gorilla Oracle are quietly pretending isn't in the room. It has been a constant source of losses for Sun for years, and only realistic and drastic cuts both to product ranges and employees will ever make it even close to breaking even. Don't take my word for it, go read the analysts reports. You Sunshiners can get all giddy and sing hymns to Ponytail all you like, but as soon as Oracle gets down to the nitty-gritty of carving up Sun's carcass you guys are going to be crying into your beer.

    Enjoy!

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    @ David Halko

    You know, I've been drinking the Schwartz-ade and agreeing with practically everything you've been posting, but that all changed on the 21st.

    You can quote press releases from Oracle until you're blue in the face, but lets put this into perspective; Schwartz has it in black and white in his FOURTH MOST RECENT BLOG ENTRY that everything at Sun was fine and dandy. I contacted senior management at the company myself, and was told that Sun is committed to its customers, its products, its stragegy and blah blah blah. Look at Schwartz's recent email to his employees, and tell me with a straight face if it isn't the lowest form of corporate double-speak.

    So, to now look at whatever Oracle is releasing publically and trying to glean some sort of factual basis out of it is simply a waste of time. You might as well be saying aliens from Mars are going to take over Sun's hardware division, and it would have as much credence.

    They've sold the company out, and f****d over their customers. Deal with it.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Oracle Cloud

    Oracle _IS_ doing Cloud Computing http://www.oracle.com/technologies/cloud/index.html

  17. David Halko

    @Anonymous: Aliens from Mars

    Anonymous Coward suggests, "So, to now look at whatever Oracle is releasing publically and trying to glean some sort of factual basis out of it is simply a waste of time."

    Perhaps, but that is the only option available.

    Anonymous Coward suggests, "You might as well be saying aliens from Mars are going to take over Sun's hardware division, and it would have as much credence."

    I have to say, that has to be the funniest line I have read in a long time!

    Anonymous Coward suggests, "I contacted senior management at the company myself... They've sold the company out... over their customers. Deal with it."

    This is all about business. When Cisco purchased Grand Junction Networks, Kalpana, and Crescendo Communications - people were not suggesting that it was do do something bad to those customers. Cisco was buying technology & a customer base - those technologies would never have been marketed any better by their individual companies.

    SUN has had a severe marketing problem since the dot-com crash. Sun tried to analyze it by sending questioners to their customer base and trying to identify which brand was the strongest. Sun publically acknowledged it, trying to re-brand themselves as JAVA instead of SUNW on the stock market as well as re-branding all their products with the Java trademark.

    To suggest that Sun had done this to do something bad to their customers is not reasonable. This could be a very good day for Sun customers. Since Oracle has such a large dependency on Sun Solaris operating systems for their profits - they seem like the best possible consumer of the company, with very little overlap.

    I can't say that I am very happy with seeing another company in the market getting consolidated, I do prefer an marketplace with more options. Since Oracle was not designing hardware and Sun was providing software that Oracle did not design, this seems like a VERY good fit - regardless of the consolidation. The market did not lose another hardware designer - this is a good thing.

  18. zvonr
    Happy

    @Matt Bryant

    Matt you showed again that you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about.

    Sun's revenue is not negative you monkey! (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=JAVA) (earnings != revenue)

    Are you taking analyst reports seriously you monkey? I certainly wish you listened to "star analyst" David Bailey from Goldman Sachs and shorted java in february.

    Get your head out of your a**! (you might notice that there are better options than HP! )

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Anon: Run For the Hills...

    I'm sure oracle will raise the costs for sun products and support. However, I doubt they'll go over what ibm charges. Clearly you've never gotten/seen the bill from ibm... And only Matt B would see a bill from HP as he's the only one who buys from them. ;o)

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Re : Sunshiner fantasies...

    Hi Matt,

    Glad you confirmed that you are as stupid as you normally make out, I'm amazed you'd expect Oracle to stand up on Day 1 of a takeover and stake there name to every products future. Use your loaf FFS.

    It looks pretty certain the x86 hardware selloff is pure speculation but Sparc's future is still undecided (for most of the world except you). But as long as there is still a need for monolithic servers then why the hell would Oracle ditch the high end & let IBM / HP mop up that market segment?

    If Rock never makes it the T2 is set to morph into KT so why would Oracle fail to send those designs in for fabrication? 8 socket, 16 core machines that would whoop ass considering the performance people get out of T2 kit right now. Over 1000 vcores Mr Bryant & running Sun4v so lots of LDOM goodness in there.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/sun_niagara_k2/

    Assuming they merge KT & Rock together (or just go with KT's sucessor) we might see a high end 64 socket, 16 core, 8 thread coming rhough. Anyone for an 8000 vcore system running sun4v ldoms?

    Your praying these don't Matt because otherwise your beloved Itanium superdomes might be losing even more market share. How long before Intel ditch the loss leader for next-gen Xeon and all HP faithfull are asked kneel & recompile, again!

    Come on Matt, wakey wakey...

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