To the strains of “Sun” music, the first keynote of Oracle Open World signified the first joint effort between Sun and Oracle. So much so, that the front rows at Larry's opening chat were packed with the likes of Scott McNealy, James Gosling and John Fowler. Before the night was over, it would be these three who talked the most, while Ellison simply kicked mud at IBM.
Blackhole Sun, by Soundgarden, wailed over the PA system as everyone gathered in for the real Sunday keynote.
Scott McNealy took the stage before Ellison, after a long montage of very candid moments from Scott's past at Sun. He began his speech by disparaging the lawyers who said he couldn't talk about what he really wanted to talk about. He then broke into one of his famous Top 10 lists. Mostly, he plied the audience with jokes at the expense of IBM, Apple and Linux.
McNealy said Sun had “kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, and we changed computing forever.” Engrave that on Sun's tombstone.
“We're not a capital equipment company with big fabs. We are all about innovation. You have to keep inventing. You have to keep creating. We did that with a lot of great people. We were one of the world's top R&D companies. Think about putting Oracle's large R&D budget with our R&D budget, and you have one of the biggest R&D budgets of all time,” said McNealy. He's right: Sun spent over a billion dollars a year on pure R&D. Its problem was that little, if any, of it yielded new revenues, let alone profits.
McNealy did eventually discuss the things we all wanted him to, though he only addressed each aspect of Sun's business through some quotes taken from Larry Ellison. Here's Larry in the room, 10 feet away, and McNealy is showing his words on the screens behind him.
Then, McNealy threw numbers at us: “There are over 216,000 SPARC servers out in the markrt today. Seven million processors shipped this decade. We went and asked Oracle what are their plans. They are going to spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now. What about Solaris? This is the No. 1 platform for Oracle. We're everywhere. We have OEM agreements with Dell, IBM, Fujitsu Seimens and HP. Don't take our word for it. Larry says we're going to spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now, so feel comfortable about that innovation,” said McNealy.
The most interesting intimation came next: “The one thing I hear a lot about is MySQL,” said McNealy, pointing out the biggest sticking point for the European Union's approval of the acquisition. “Is it going to get clobbered? I don't think so. Larry has said it doesn't compete with the Oracle database, which is true. This competes with Microsoft. This competes with Microsoft SQL Server. It doesn't compete with Oracle or DB2."
He then pointed out that Oracle had previously purchased Innobase, which builds one of the most popular transaction engines for MySQL.
“We shouldn't be worried,” said McNealy. “MySQL is GPL. If Oracle messes with it, the world will fork. There's not quite an issue here, we're not sure why it's held up, but we're working with the authorities to make sure they understand that.”
Java was another hot topic, and McNealy then brought James Gosling, vice president and the father of Java, on stage to discuss the future of the programming language and ecosystem. Long story short, the pair agreed that everything would be peachy for Java.
They bantered about how they now have a huge collective pool of programmers when Sun and Oracle mix their developer networks.
“I've never worked for a software company, so I am looking forward to it,” said Gosling.
“It won't be a software company after we get done with them,” replied McNealy.
In an attempt to prove this, John Fowler was then brought on stage to disucss a wildly powerful new flash storage array, and to discuss the future Oracle database systems they are building. Privately, Fowler remarked that Ellison had been keeping the Sun systems unit busy with new performance mandates.
Ellison then came on stage and went over, point by point, the ad that Oracle released in August, which promised monetary commitments to Sun's existing product lines. He added a new line to the previously four-point list, this one promising MySQL would also receive more money for development and research.
He then described a lengthy benchmark-related dispute between Oracle and IBM, culminating in an actual benchmark of the new Sun Oracle database server.
“One man's sunset is another man's sunrise,” said Ellison, before launching into a lengthy enumeration of the problems with IBM's servers. He even played one of IBM's own ads, which advocated the use of its computer systems to find new oil wells. “In the immortal words of Sarah Palin, 'drill baby, drill,'” said Ellison.
If any companies want to fund the development of their new database-driven application, Oracle will put up $10 million for anyone who can build an application that will not run twice as fast on Sun gear as it will on IBM gear. He then asked IBM to enter the contest for said money.
After that swaggering gauntlet throw, McNealy came back on stage and rehashed his starry eyed endorsement of the acquisition.
“I believe our shareholders made an exciting decision given the choices that they had. I am counting on Larry and the Oracle team to take very good care of a very important legacy of mine, and of the founders, and the employees and shareholders of Sun Microsystems,” said McNealy.
And with that, the beer and music began, and the new Sun/Oracle database system was forklifted off stage and put back in its crate.