As if the two weren’t tight enough after 20 years, Sun Microsystems CEO
Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will hold a special employee
meeting Tuesday to discuss the “next phase” of the companies’ alliance.
Details of this enhanced relationship are murky, but Sun made a point of
describing the meeting as a “reinvigorated relationship, not a merger or
acquisition” in a statement.
McNealy and Ellison will discuss the “importance of Java and Oracle’s
commitment to Java, Oracle’s new multi-core pricing and going to market
together to expand adoption of Oracle and Sun technologies.”
An Oracle spokeswoman told internetnews.com: “Unfortunately neither
company will be offering comment until the event itself, when Larry and
Scott are on stage.”
A Sun spokesman said the event will not be “news-driven” but alluded to the
unpredictability of McNealy and Ellison, who are slated to speak at 2 p.m.
PDT at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, Calif.
“It’s a celebration of a 20-plus-year partnership and a chance to hear two CEOs
talking about the relationship between the two companies and the future
direction of the partnership,” the spokesman said. “That said, you still
never know what Larry and Scott will say once they’re on stage.”
What is known is that Sun and Oracle have been ramping up their partnership
at a brisk pace in the last few months.
In November, the companies announced that Sun’s open Solaris 10 operating system would be the preferred
64-bit application development and deployment platform.
A few weeks later, Oracle President Chuck Phillips joined McNealy onstage at
Sun’s UltraSparc T1 server launch to say that Oracle will cut its licensing fees by charging users on a processor factor of .25 for each UltraSparc T1.
What could the next step be?
Oracle has been devouring applications vendors at a prodigious pace. Sun has
also been padding its portfolio with buys and releasing new computing
machines to help customers consolidate workloads.
Pund-IT analyst Charles King, who viewed the invite from Sun, said the
mention that the meeting would not be a merger was interesting in itself.
Instead, King said Oracle and Sun could pledge to start working more
concertedly together to make Sun systems the environment of choice for
delivering Oracle services and applications.
After all, Sun would love to be the preferred OS and hardware provider for
the so-called Web 2.0. On the other side of the coin, King said Oracle’s
application frenzy dovetails nicely with some of the goals of the large
server vendors, such as Sun, IBM and HP.
“With its acquisition strategy, Oracle is actively moving from being
considered purely as a database provider into becoming an application
service provider headed in the same direction that all of the big system
vendors seem to be headed,” King told internetnews.com.
“This is the eventual future where the hardware, operating system and big
pieces of middleware like the database and Web servers are the
infrastructure for delivering business services and applications.”
Regardless of what Ellison and McNealy say, Sun and Oracle make a sound
united front — applications, operating system, and oodles of middleware — against a number of larger vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft and HP.
