Oracle Vows to Deliver Highly Integrated Software and Hardware
January 28, 2010
Oracle Corporation vowed to deliver highly integrated sets of business applications, information databases and computer hardware that will run it all, as it concluded its purchase of Sun Microsystems Wednesday.
The completion of the merger came ten months after Oracle announced its plan to acquire the maker of high-performance processors and servers and developer of the Java programming language.
The merger had been held up by a review in Europe of whether competition in database software might be reduced. Oracle has built itself into a powerhouse in technology over the last three decades on the strength of its namesake relational database; Sun owned the much-less costly open-source rival, MySQL.
Oracle's plans to acquire Sun will mean tighter integration between Oracle databases and Sun hardware. However, Aite Group analyst Adam Honore recently surveyed two dozen capital markets CIOs about the merger, and says that companies running "critical instances" of MySQL are dubious of Oracle's claims that it will protect that less-costly database.
"There are quite a few MySQL instances [on Wall Street], for a variety of relational database applications. It's all over the place,'' he said.
The uncertain future of MySQL is their biggest concern about the merger, he said.
Other CIOs were also worried about the future of the Sun hardware, he said, with the merger accelerating plans to move to a different platform. "You're probably looking at a few percentage point reduction in market share," he said.
Sun has historically been a powerhouse in capital markets with its Sparc hardware and Solaris operating system, which have allowed brokerages to trade faster and more reliably. Its Java language is used for enterprise software, and the MySQL database is a popular back end for Wall Street's Web-based applications.
The completion of the merger competed for the spotlight with Apple’s iPad announcement. In a day long set of presentations at its headquarters in California, the company made its case for how it would deliver “complete, engineered, and integrated systems,” with an emphasis on a new Oracle technology “stack” that spans applications, middleware, database and hardware. Here’s a rundown.
