Oracle acquisition of Sun

Oracle Sun Acquisition

Will Oracle give up on Sun hardware or try to press some kind of technical advantage of custom circuitry? That is an interesting question. Oracle will most definitely try to press some kind of custom circuitry or "appliance" solution for its high volume data customers. Over the last few years Oracle initiated a partnership with HP to develop its exadata appliance. Larry Ellison is on record as saying that by controlling the hardware and the database software Oracle would be able to greatly increase the overall machine's capabilities.

"Oracle started designing hardware and software to work together a few years ago when we began our Exadata database machine development project. The combination of hardware and software has significant performance advantages for data warehousing applications. We had to respond with our own hardware/software combination, the Exadata database machine." (Larry Ellison 5-7-2009)

Now that Oracle owns Sun, HP will most likely be removed from the appliance development. Furthermore, if you look across the IT landscape right now you'll notice a few trends. IBM has spent billions creating a streaming analytics platform to enable analysis on huge streams of data. This software currently can only be deployed on IBM supercomputers, however. IBM's first customer was TD North who implemented the system to model the commodities market. This type of massive data set analysis is the next big thing in corporate analytics and Oracle is way behind. In addition to IBMs system S or Infosphere system, there are other appliances on the market, like Netezza, that are specifically designed to enable analysis on big data sets. Walters Kluwer selected Netezza to create an on demand analytic system for pharmaceutical professionals, this would be a very massive set of data.

(https://www.netezza.com/releases/2007/release010907.htm) Thus, Oracle is going to have to press some kind of custom circuitry advantage with Sun in order to keep up in what will soon become a hot market for software companies. In addition to these trends and Oracle's need to position itself, a very large percentage of Oracle databases are already deployed on Sun Unix machines. This gives Oracle a starting point that other vendors did not enjoy. (IBM started Infosphere development from scratch.)

Case Studies

Quick Links