Oracle Outlines Integration With Sun

Competing for the spotlight with Apple’s iPad announcement, Oracle (ORCL) outlined integration strategies for its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was completed yesterday. The company’s presentations focused on delivering “complete, engineered, and integrated systems,” with an emphasis on the new Oracle stack that spans applications, middleware, database and hardware.

During the long wait for approval from the European Union many speculated on exactly how, or if Oracle would integrate mySQL, Java or Open Office. Here’s a look at some areas where we learned more:

Cloud Computing
The Open Cloud Platform Sun introduced last year is dead, according to The Register, “We have no plans to build something like Amazon’s EC2,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect. “We don’t plan to be in the rent-by-minute computer business. We plan to provide technology for others that are in the rent-by-minute computer business and lots of other business you might call cloud computing.” Sun cloud was to be hosted at the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas operated by Switch Communciations, which also hosted Sun’s Network.com cloud service.

Java
Oracle will continue to to innovate and invest in the Java platform.  Oracle has been involved with Java since 1995 and will continue to advance the platform that powers 2.6 billion phones and over 40 million televisions, game consoles and blu-ray devices. The Java ONE conference held annually in San Franciso will be expanded to Brazil, Russia, India and China.  Glassfish will remain a Reference Implementation, while Oracle Weblogic remains as a strategic enterprise application server.  See oracle.com/java for additional information.

Open Office
Managed as a separate business unit OpenOffice will continue to receive investment dollars from Oracle. StarOffice will continue to be licensed for commercial use and migrate into the Oracle Office product family.  A web office version was mentioned, as Open Office was positioned as the first desktop to web to mobile solution centered around the ODF open standard.

MySQL
Oracle announced it would maintain the open source MySQL database, as well as increase sales and marketing development teams.  MySQL was a major point of review for the European Union and it is no surprise that Oracle announced that MySQL would be maintained as a totally separate business unit.

Some operational announcements were made as well, such as a 2011 combined research and development budget of $4.3 billion.  There was a lot of speculation over Sun layoffs, however the New York Times reports that Larry Ellison said Oracle planned to lay off fewer than 2,000 people, while hiring more than 2,000 people in engineering, sales and other roles.  Many top Sun executives, including Jonathan Schwartz will not make the migration to Oracle.  Sun co-founder and chairman Scott McNealy issued a memo titled “Thanks for a great 28 years” where he said Sun and its people and technology had potential to be at the center of yet another industry and game-changing inflection point.

Larry Ellison told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that Sun will add $1.5 billion to Oracle’s bottom line in the first year, as it gets out of businesses “that don’t make money.” Specifically mentioned were the Sun low end commodity servers. In a Wednesday New York Times Dealbook article Mr. Ellison is quoted as saying that “Sun has wonderful engineering, but they didn’t seem to like selling very much.”  He also said “the partner model was disastrous, and we are immediately changing that.”

Oracle will hold worldwide welcome events to learn more about the integration throughout the rest of 2010.  For complete details and webcast sessions covering integration pieces go to oracle.com/sun.

Roundup: EU Clears Oracle to Acquire Sun

Oracle announced Thurday that it has finally received regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.  China and Russia are expected to give unconditional approval shortly and they will then close the transaction. The Commission concluded that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it.

Public Relations: Pick A Busy News Cycle
In what looks like PR strategy, Oracle has scheduled an all day live event to detail an integration strategy – on the same day that Apple is expected to announce its new tablet product, an event certain to dominate the day’s tech news coverage. Larry Ellison is set to host the live event next Wednesday for customers, partners, press and analysts to outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps and how customers will benefit from the hardware and software integration.

Roundup: Force 10 Networks, Avocent, Facebook

Here’s a roundup of news announcements from the data center and hosting industry:

• Force 10 demonstrates at Interop. Force 10 Networks partnered with AFORE Solutions and Sun Microsystems at INTEROP in New York last week to demonstrate data center virutalization products and cloud computing initiatives focused on driving greater network agility. The 3 vendors demonstrated virtualized resource allocation for cloud-oriented applications as well as the AFORE ASE3300 Virutalization Extension Platform.  The ASE3300 and Force 10 switch and router solutions combine to enable a multi-site, virtual data center enabling migration to cloud computing environments.
• Avocent upgrades data center management software. Announced at Interop last week, Avocent is upgrading its MergePoint Infrastructure Explorer to include several new management capabilities.  The company said these enhancements will provide a unique view into capacity planning, bringing additional return on investment and total cost of ownership benefits.  Avocent CTO Ben Grimes said that the software will allow “customers to know where their assets are, as well as plan for different ‘what if’ scenarios, and manage their data centers to reduce risk -  all while bringing improved ROI and total cost of ownership benefits to customers.”  New features include rack timeline and an enhanced change management and capacity search capabilities.

Dean Nelson Moves from Sun to eBay

The ongoing game of musical chairs among top data center executives continues. Dean Nelson, who has been a key player in data center operations at Sun Microsystems, has left to take a position at eBay, where he will be the Senior Director of Global Data Strategy, Architecture and Operations. Dean announced the change on his blog at Data Center Pulse, where he is a co-founder. Nelson’s shift follows the departure of Olivier Sanche, who recently left eBay to head data center operations at Apple.

In other recent executive moves, Michael Manos moved from Microsoft to Digital Realty Trust, and Kevin Timmons shifted from Yahoo to Microsoft.

“I am very excited to help eBay achieve its vision of the future,” Dean writes. “I am absolutely on-board and ready to rumble.  I’m also excited about what this means for Data Center Pulse. We’re killing two birds with one stone here. The work that I am responsible for in eBay, is perfectly aligned with the industry efforts we are pushing for in DCP.  We will be accelerating our efforts and uniting end-users to drive innovation and direct the future of the datacenter market.”

Rumor Patrol: HP May Buy Sun Hardware?

Fortune has a report that once Oracle closes on its deal to buy Sun Microsystsems, it will sell Sun’s hardware business to HP. Fortune’s Jon Fortt writes that “a person with knowledge of the communication between Oracle and HP suggested to me recently that Oracle still might deal those hardware assets to HP.”

Any sentence that includes the phrases “suggested” and “might” strikes me as pretty speculative. The chatter has since spilled onto financial blogs but doesn’t appear to have had a meaningful impact on the shares of any of the companies involved.

For what it’s worth, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the record saying he intends to keep the Sun hardware business intact. “We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business,” Ellison said in May. ”While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”

That hasn’t cooled persistent speculation that the hardware unit is for sale. In June The Register cited a source close to Oracle as saying that the company “has continued to shop Sun’s hardware business around to potential buyers” but was seeking an “unrealistic” price.

Sun’s Cloud Chilling at Vegas SuperNAP

What lies ahead for the Sun Open Cloud Platform unveiled in March? That will likely be a decision for Oracle Systems (ORCL), which has agreed to acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA) for $7.4 billion, with the deal is expected to close this summer. Until then, the Sun Cloud is chilling in the SuperNAP in Las Vegas, where its servers are housed in one of Switch Communciations’ custom high-density computing pods known as a T-SCIF (short for Thermal Separate Compartment in Facility). We had a look at the Sun installation during a recent tour of the SuperNAP. The racks are packed top to bottom with servers, creating a power load of up to 24 kW per rack. This video from Sun provides an inside look at the company’s operation at the SuperNAP and the cooling systems that manage that density for the Sun cloud platform. This video runs about 5 minutes.

For additional information, check out our SuperNAP Channel and Sun Microsystems Channel. For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

MegaRoundup: The Oracle-Sun Deal

The twists and turns continue in the Battle for the Data Center. Yesterday’s surprise announcement that Oracle Corp. (ORCL) will acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA)  has generated an enormous amount of commentary, analysis and speculation. Here’s a mega-roundup:

• Steve O’Donnell at The Hot Aisle says the deal could be disruptive for the storage sector. “If Oracle becomes a horizontal storage systems supplier, this announcement does not bode well for NTAP, PAR, and EMC as 40% or so of corporate data is stored in databases and these companies’ sales reps look for database implementations/upgrades as buying catalysts,” O’Donnell writes. “If Oracle sees all of these transactions first, they will capture a portion of the storage spend easily.”
• Forrester analyst James Staten writes that Sun’s server and storage businesses “don’t fit (Oracle’s) model and certainly don’t justify the further investment in the SPARC microprocessor that will be needed to keep this business healthy … expect Oracle to shop these units tout suite.” Staten sees Dell and HP as likely bidders.
• The Burton Group says the deal is good news for customers. “The bad news is the uncertainty this creates around the long term future for Sun’s hardware products, particularly its UltraSPARC high-end servers,” writes Nik simpson. “The question is, ‘What does Oracle plan to do with the hardware business?’, because lets face it, the reason for the acquisition is Java, not hardware.”
• The 451 Group examined Oracle’s track record on open source technologies. “While Oracle has displayed an ability to participate in and benefit from open source software, I think its expectations and aspirations for open source software are limited,” writes Jay Lyman. “You can’t blame a company making billions for not getting to excited about millions, especially when sometimes the millions are simply numbers of users.”
• Om Malik also focuses on the fate of MySQL, expressing concern but concluding that “Oracle will keep MySQL going mostly because it can act as a funnel for further business opportunities.”

Oracle Agrees to Buy Sun for $7.4 Billion

Oracle Corp. has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, the companies said this morning, putting a new twist on the emerging battle for the enterprise data center. The deal comes just weeks after the collapse of a bid by IBM to purchase Sun at a similar price point. IBM’s last offer had been rumored to be valued at about $9.40 a share, while Oracle will pay $9.50. Shares of Sun (JAVA) closed Friday at $6.69.

The deal also allows Oracle to acquire MySQL, the dominant open source database, which was acquired by Sun last year. Oddly, in the press announcment Oracle doesn’t mention MySQL, but cites “substantial long-term strategic customer advantages” in acquiring two other Sun technologies, Java and Solaris. Oracle’s  Fusion Middleware is built on top of Java.

By buying Sun, Oracle also moves into the hardware business in a more significant way. Oracle partnered with HP last year on a database server, which marked its first foray into hardware. The deal also gives Oracle an entree into the emerging market for cloud computing, where Sun recently announced a new platform.

Is Sun-IBM Deal Back On Track?

Last week there were many reports that the rumored deal for IBM to buy Sun Microsystems was dead. Our take at the time was that wasn’t clear whether the deal was genuinely on its deadbed or the two companies were negotiating through media leaks.

Bloomberg is now reporting that the two companies may be ready to resume talks “if IBM makes a stronger commitment to close the acquisition.” Sun’s shares have slipped to $6.13 since the companies stopped talking, well below the reported IBM offer of $9.40 a share. This is obviously one to watch. This feels like one of those scenarios where things could come together quickly if the parties actually return to the table.