Oracle Finally Gets to Bask in Satisfaction of Sun Buyout

After nine months of jumping through legal hoops, Oracle on Jan. 27 closed its $7.4 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems. The world’s second-largest software company wasted no time explaining to everybody what it is going to do with its newly acquired hardware, software and services businesses. It staged a full-day press and analyst briefing on that very same day to do just that. Since the companies have been working together since the 1980s, many of their products are already integrated; however, some new ones are not and will take some time to put together. More difficult will be the integration of some 27,000 Sun employees into the Oracle culture, one that, in some ways, is very different from Sun’s. Following are photos of some of the highlights of the Jan. 27 event.

An estimated 500 journalists, analysts, Oracle partners/customers and assorted guests jammed into the company’s Redwood City, Calif., auditorium on Jan. 27 for the event.

After undoubtedly working through a lot of angst as his company jumped through legal hoops to acquire Sun, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was cheerful and upbeat as he offered his take on the new company to the audience.

Ellison likes to show pictures of his BMW Oracle Racing America’s Cup boats when he is on stage.

Oracle President Charles Phillips described the new company at a high level. Phillips started his presentation with an oblique reference to the negative publicity generated when an alleged ex-mistress put up a billboard in New York City’s Times Square disclosing her relationship with the married Oracle president. Phillips has since issued a statement acknowleding the relationship and confirming that he is in the midst of divorce proceedings initiated in 2008. He opened his presentation by cordially saying “Welcome, hopefully you all had a smoother week than I did.”

Data center customers will have to get used to the new Sun Oracle logos on servers and storage arrays.

All the new Sun Oracle rack-mount machines will look like this one.

Oracle executives made a case for their company as being “the only” full-service IT vendor that can supply all pieces of the IT stack — including vertical applications. Some of the companies mentioned in this slide may not agree.

Oracle will be making major changes in the Sun supply chain, so channel resellers and systems integrators may want to take note. In fact, the entire sales/marketing/channel structure will be changing; it was never Sun’s strength from the beginning, so some positive results are expected here.

The simple message “Software. Hardware. Complete.” was in evidence everywhere at the event. The message may be simple, but change at this high level is never easy.

Sun Oracle’s new Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage system demonstrated some benchmarks during the event.

Oh, yes. Oracle reminds everybody that it is indeed hiring about 2,000 more people — engineers, mostly — to bolster Sun’s businesses. These buttons were worn by Oracle staffers during the event.