It has been only one day since Oracle announced details of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems, and the dust is far from settling. Oracle, a software company, needs to pacify Sun’s customers and build confidence in those asking how they will conduct business with a hardware company operated by a software company.
Sun’s hardware customers may especially be questioning Oracle’s devotion to Sun’s hardware business since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in the past attempted to acquire only Sun’s software assets.
Ellison, who built Oracle by focusing on software and looking away from hardware built by companies like Sun, attempted to calm customers’ jitters by telling them that Oracle is headed in a new direction. That new direction includes both software and hardware, Ellison said.
The company plans to rely less on partners and instead build its own hardware and software systems. Oracle will sell those systems directly to customers instead of through resellers. Currently, the company sells only one system that combines Oracle software and Sun hardware — the Sun Oracle Database Machine with blade servers, Flash memory, and storage.
The package combines hardware from Sun, Oracle 11g Release 2, and Oracle Exadata Storage Server software. Oracle said it is a completely scalable and fault-tolerant package for all of a customer’s data-warehousing and online-transaction applications.
The machine was developed with Sun’s hardware not long after the company first announced plans to acquire Sun. The product has a pipeline of more than $100 million in sales, according to published reports.
“We are confident that Oracle’s [Sun] Solaris support strategy will not change post-acquisition, but Sun users need to validate the demonstrable increase in commitment to Solaris on the part of Oracle’s core engineering groups,” said Gartner analyst Andrew Butler in an analysis of the acquisition.
Another suggestion by Butler…