Oracle acquiring Sun

This morning it was announced that Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems took me by surprise. http://www.oracle.com/sun I worked for Sun for 13 years and have been at Oracle for almost 3. These are my notes from the briefing call that happened this morning.

This was a decision done at the highest levels. Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy were both on the call. The call started with Safra Catz talking about the financial analysis. This deal is larger than Hyperion but smaller than BEA and PeopleSoft. The deal expect to have a higher margin and add $1.5B in non-gaap income. The income will be 15 cents per share after the first year. This is more profitable than the other acquisitions. Oracle has the experience of doing this and we will combine the software apps quickly. The combined company will focus on joint customers and help reduce cost and complexity. Sun currently outsources all manufacturing and post-merger Oracle will manage this to maintain profitability.

Larry Ellison took over and talked about the success of the history of acquisitions. He focused on Solaris and Java as the key technical reasons. Java is the best known brand and is one of the most widely used platforms. Our middleware technology is based on this foundation and moving forward we can customize both to make them work even better together. Sun’s largest business is the SPARC server component. Solaris is the best Unix technology available in the market. Oracle databases is deployed on Solaris more than any other platform. The next platform is the Linux operating system. With the acquisition of Solaris, Oracle can optimize the leading operating system as well as the leading database to reduce complexity and improve performance. Both of these products are based on open technology. The combination of these two products will allow a growth of footprint and make it easier for customers to deploy complete and integrated hardware and software systems. Tuning Sun systems for Oracle will help benefit existing customers

Scott McNealy followed this with the history of Sun and Oracle and the common innovations that have been done in the past. Both companies are key innovators and this innovation will continue moving forward. The joint company will allow companies to focus on what is important to them, running their business not running their data centers

Jonathan Schwartz spoke about the ability to address a broader array of platforms to talk to a larger number of technology problems. Oracle now can drive an industry phase change into the industry while remaining based in open technologies.

Charles Philips talked about the CIO advisory board from weeks ago and the consensus was that our initial foray into the Exadata/hardware solution was good and that we should do more. Tighter integration with hardware and software reduces the complexity and support issues with business solutions. Ready to deploy servers targeted at industries are one possibility. Sun’s open storage platform is very similar to Exadata solutions. Storage is a continuing and expanding market for years to come. There are exciting and new opportunities with Java. We will have the largest software development community in the world

Overall the conference call was simple, to the point, and stuck to the facts. There was no Q&A after the call, only the announcement. My personal opinion is that this will generate a significant amount of discussion. There are some overlays of products in the identity and Linux areas. It is interesting that Oracle now owns SleepyCat/BerkeleyDB as well as MySQL. It is also interesting that Oracle also owns JRocket and Java. My gut feel is that the Glassfish technology will come into play for the business users and it will introduce new innovation into the fusion suite of products moving forward. This will confuse things with Microsoft moving forward as well as a few other software partners. For me personally, I have been talking with a bunch of friends that I haven’t talked to in months.