Sun and Oracle offer new server/database deal
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
It almost seems like ancient history now, but there was a time when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his counterpart at Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy, seemed united in battle against Microsoft. In public appearances, both men routinely made Microsoft technology the butt of their jokes.
The rhetoric subsided in recent years, as Oracle turned its attention to acquiring other competitors, and Sun simply struggled to survive as its server platforms began losing market share. And last fall, when Oracle started touting Linux as a viable platform for both its database and applications, it appeared these two longtime partners may have split for good.
No so, says Larry Singer, senior VP and strategic insight officer at Sun.
"We will continue working together because we have found that we both make more money when we do," Singer said in a recent interview with Manufacturing Business Technology. It became obvious this past January that the two companies are still collaborating, when Ellison and McNealy shared a stage at Oracle's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters to unveil a new program under which customers can get a free enterprise edition of the Oracle database by purchasing selected Sun Servers.
Under this offer, which comes with midrange and higher-end Sun servers such as the four-processor Sun Fire V490, Sun will pay the initial license fee for the Oracle database, in addition to footing the bill for a year of support. After that, users will be responsible for their own support costs, as well as Oracle's annual maintenance fees. Still, Singer says, the potential savings could be significant, considering that Oracle database prices are based on the number of servers a process contains.
"The bigger the server, the cooler this gets," McNealy said at the time of the announcement. According to Singer, savings could go as high as $850,000 for a company that purchased Sun's top-of-the-line Sun Fire E25K server, which has as many as 72 dual-core processors.
Singer admits Sun neglected its relationship with Oracle somewhat during the dot-com era, "when we could make a ton of money without going to market with others." Since then, both market conditions and technology advances have brought the partners back together.
"Oracle has made a commitment to Java and J2EE as the underlying architecture for its application suite," Singer says. "Those applications also are multi-threaded, and Sun is the leader in multi-threading computing, so we're back to a joint offering."
