Larry Ellison’s Dreams Come True

Oracle is officially moving forward with integrating its latest acquisition, Sun Microsystems. Oracle’s CEO, Larry Ellison, usually get what he wants, and even if there huddles to overcome such are questions from EU about MySQL. One only has to look at the acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005. After being rebuffed multiple times, it is now part of Oracle. Since 2005, Oracle has made 52 acquisitions, including BEA systems, Siebel Systems, and the aforementioned PeopleSoft. With the Sun Microsystems acquisition complete, it is now providing a glimpse into the future. Today, Oracle is holding an event for customers which lays out the strategic vision on how Sun’s servers, storage, operating system and software will complement the database and application middleware that are the company’s signature products.

"We've been talking about this for years," Oracle president Charles Phillips stated during the presentation. "We've extended it down to more and more layers." "One upside of this transaction taking so long to close was that it gave us plenty of time to work on the details," he stated as he went on. "We have a complete system that's engineered to work together and be delivered faster across domains." "The breakthroughs will be the interaction between the stacks," Phillips added. "With separate vendors developing products at each level, it's very hard to get engineers to work together. It just never happens. It's hard to get them to work together even when they work at the same company. Ask IBM. They know."

In fiscal 2011, Oracle will increase its research and development spending from $2.8 billion to $4.3 billion. It plans on making a sizeable investment in Sun’s Solaris operating system, the Java program language as well as the SPARC chipsets and servers. "We're going to spend money to re-energize the key assets at Sun, the products," Phillips stated. Oracle is planning on hiring 2000 engineering and sales professionals offsetting, if only partially, the layoffs it planned when the deal was first announced.

Oracle has combined both its hardware and software in one stack, which moves it into the category of system provider similar to HP and Cisco. Oracle claims to have the best comprehensive offering in the industry. "There's no other company that can claim that they're in the complete systems business," Phillips said. "We're in all these categories and engineer across all of them. They couldn't do it from a coordination perspective and simply don't have components."

Sometimes history repeats itself as today’s Oracle somewhat resembles the old IBM from the 1960’s. "It is odd that the computer industry ships all these separate parts and expects customers to assemble them," Larry Ellison said in an interview with The New York Times earlier. "You will now be buying this complete system, and don’t have to hire IBM or someone else to assemble it for you.

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