That sound you heard in the Silicon Valley was Sun Microsystems employees heaving a sigh of relief. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told Reuters that he has no plans to dump Sun’s hardware. On the contrary, he’s committed to the SPARC processor line.
“We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business,” he told Reuters in an e-mail interview yesterday. “If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones. We think think designing our own chips is very, very important.”
A spokesperson for Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) declined to comment. Oracle did not return calls for comment, but the company has posted a full transcriptof Ellison’s interview.
Sun came within a whisker of being bought by IBM in March, but the deal collapsed at the eleventh hour. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), after just three days of negotiations, swooped in and grabbedSun for virtually the same asking price that IBM was ready to pay.
Since then, there has been speculation that Oracle, a software company, would ditch Sun’s struggling hardware business.
With Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) growing dominance and ever-improving performance, the server world has transitioned away from proprietary processors to x86, and Sun has suffered for it. It hasn’t helped that IBM has been particularly aggressive at stealing Sun customers.
With the Sun SPARC hardware business contracting, speculation was that Ellison just wanted Sun’s software assets and he would dump the rest. Not so. He said he plans to increase, not reduce investment in Sun’s SPARC microprocessors.
Gartnerfellow Martin Reynolds thinks Oracle can make the hardware work, but is unsure of its long-term viability.
“When you look at Sun, a little adult supervision can make that business very profitable,” he told InternetNews.com. “They’ve had a hard time coming to grips with driving the business after practicality. Frankly, the open source thing hasn’t worked for Sun, and that’s been the mantra for years. Oracle is the other extreme, the pinstriped suit with a spreadsheet and a pencil. They know how to make a business work.”
With Oracle behind Sun, a lot of questions about Sun hardware’s future go away, at least for a while, he added.
Long term, there are still questions, and he thinks Oracle would be better off going the x86 route. “The challenge with SPARC is it has always been a laggard. Sun has clung to it a little longer than it should have. A lot of it depends on how good Rock is. If Rock is a killer product, then that might keep SPARC going for a few more years. But ultimately, you can’t trust SPARC to deliver the goods because it doesn’t,” he added.
“Rock” is the codename for Sun’s long-delayed successor to the Niagara line of processors. The closest to a formal name came from a blog postingby Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who showed a picture of a test sample with the name “UltraSPARC RK.” Originally planned for 2008, it’s now not likely to see the light of day until later this year at best.
Reynolds thinks Sun’s SPARC staff should still be cautious. “[Oracle] does want Sun to make a profit, they will be aggressive about it. I’m not entirely convinced investing in SPARC is the path forward, but if Larry Ellison says it, that does add some credibility. But I do think that for Sun customers that leads to a much clearer future,” he said.
“One thing’s for sure, Oracle isn’t going to pull the rug out from under people. There is no religion at Oracle about this, they are going to do what’s right for customers because they understand how you run the business,” he added.
Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.