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.