Oracle Outlines Strategic Technology Plan for Sun

Looking to assuage customer concerns over one of the biggest IT company mergers ever, Oracle outlined its strategic plans for the combined company.

About the only surprise in the plan is Oracle’s decision to retreat from Intel-based server market for Windows in favor of focusing on high-end machines aimed at the data center. This decision reflects Oracle’s core strength in the enterprise and portends forthcoming highly integrated servers that combine processors, storage and networking technologies running Sun operating systems with Oracle database and middleware software. Those systems would then be optimized to run a raft of Oracle enterprise applications.

Oracle and former Sun executives such as John Fowler, who is now lead systems development at Oracle, pledged to continue investing in Sun technologies. Specifically, Oracle plans to accelerate the rollout of next-generation Sun processors that Oracle will need to compete against integrated servers from companies such as Cisco and Hewlett-Packard that rely on high-end Xeon processors from Intel. Those multi-core processors will all be optimized to run virtual machine software that comes bundled with Sun operating systems.

As part of that effort, Oracle is bringing together the two companies' virtual machine technologies to create a family of virtualization products for Sparc and X86 systems and, for the first time, extend Oracle’s virtual machine technology out to the desktop. The Oracle VM technology is based on the open source Xen virtual machine.

Fowler also said that Oracle will focus heavily on improving application performance by investing heavily in flash memory and low-cost disk technologies at the storage level. Those investments will lead to performance improvements in orders of magnitude over what’s available today using an integrated file system that simplifies the management of the overall system.

On the software front, Oracle made it very clear that Sun products and technologies are the junior partner. Oracle will continue to support a host of Glassfish middleware software that Sun developed, but those products will largely be positioned at the departmental level, while Oracle products and technologies serve as the “strategic” platform for the enterprise.

The open source MySQL database will continue to be developed within a dedicated Oracle open source division within Oracle that manages the company’s efforts around Linux and the Oracle virtual machine offering. OpenOffice will also be maintained as a separate division, and Oracle pledged to deliver a cloud implementation of OpenOffice that will compete with similar services from Google, IBM and Microsoft.

Oracle pledged to integrate the two companies' Java offerings to create a seamless experience for developers that would span everything from mobile and embedded systems on the low end to enterprise implementations on the high end.

Oracle also said it would deliver new capabilities that would allow customers to send system reports back to Oracle that would result in recommendations about how to best manage various system events and related issues.

This latter capability may the first tangible benefits of the combined companies that will result in, according to Oracle president Charles Phillips, Sun becoming the gold standard server architecture for Oracle software.