Oracle Outlines Post Merger Roadmap

Now that Oracle has finalized its $7.4-billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it is reassuring Sun customers that they can rely on the newly combined entity to support their UltraSparc- and Solaris-based systems--and a lot more, if they're willing to buy integrated hardware/software packages. Oracle will add stacks of software, including its 11g database, Oracle business applications and Fusion middleware, to UltraSparc servers along with the operating system. Customers can get virtualization software from Oracle as well in the form of Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Management. All the pieces will be certified to work together and optimized for maximum performance. "We like that strategy a lot and we're going to adopt it," Ellison added.

An early example is the Exadata database machine, a blade server cluster with Flash memory and storage in a single box. Oracle produced the machine with Sun hardware shortly after acquisition plans were announced April 20.

Despite the focus on combined hardware/software products, Ellison took pains to emphasize that Oracle will continue to sell separate products. "That doesn't mean we're getting out of the component business. Our goal is to build the best of breed components and we're going to integrate those components together" into hardware appliances.

"We can deliver better integration than IBM," Ellison added.

IBM was a name which came up frequently in Ellison's talk. A key difference between what IBM did with the mainframe and Oracle's current product plans are Oracle products will be built to public standards, such as the Java programming language, he added.