Business as usual for Oracle/Sun

DATABASE OUTFIT ORACLE spent the morning trying to convince customers and partners that it will be business as usual for Sun, following the recently completed acquisition of the company.

During an event in London today the company stressed that none of Sun's product lines were being halted, but that in fact billions was being poured into the continued development of Sun hardware and software.

According to the Sun/Oracle presenters the combined company can now address the entire stack from the applications, through the middleware, operating system and virtualisation layer right through to the bare metal hardware and storage disks.

While dismissing what he called "speculation in the press" Dermot O'Kelly, a senior vice president at Oracle explained that "putting the hardware and software together in a coherent system just makes sense."

He went on to add that the acquisition means that the company can now fully test systems up and down the entire stack, ensuring that updates not only work perfectly with all the other components, but that software and hardware can be optimised to work together to be even faster than when working with other hardware/software combinations.

After extolling the virtues of this seamless stack O'Kelly then went on to add that the company is completely committed to open standards, so each component can be used in conjunction with other, more inferior products should users opt for that route.

Judging by our discussions with a few Sun/Oracle customers during the break this, it'll be optimised to run as a single entity, but we'll ensure interoperability seemed to cause some confusion, as if Oracle is trying to be Jack-of-all-trades and master-of-all as well.

Details about upcoming products were a little vague, but particular focus was put on the development of Sparc processors, the use of SSDs as a form of Flash cache - dubbed Flashfire - and OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 which are due out later this year.

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of Sun's hugely popular open source database MySQL.

Unfortunately there was a strict no Q&A policy and the Oracle/Sun guys were obviously told to say as little as possible to the press that were in attendance so when it comes to other concerns, such as the fate of MySQL, the only response we could garner was that it was safe because the EU had stipulated that as part of agreeing to the acquisition, a response which doesn't exactly fill us with gleeful optimism.

Our concerns are furthered by this week's departure of Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, Simon Phipps. While he was generally gushing in his farewell blog post, Phipps lamented that "despite the success of the open source software businesses, it still wasn't enough to rescue Sun in the end."

We can only hope Phipps and all the others who have put so much effort into promoting open source development aren't kyboshed by Sun's new overlords. µ