Sun-Oracle Pas De D'oh!!
Now news of a joint employee "town hall" to be held at Oracle's conference center January 10, has put speculation off the charts.
The meeting, which Sun's PR agency touted to reporters this week, will feature Sun's Scott McNealy and Oracle's own Larry Ellison.
Let's recap the latest in the long-running adventures of Scooter and Larry:
Despite a two-decade history of close partnership, Oracle a few years back touted its new and ardent love of all things Linuxactually of all things that suck the margin out of solutions except for the Oracle pieces. This came as Scott McNealy was still disparaging Linux. Oracle, facing price pressures on its bread-and-butter database had to show that an Oracle solution could be price competitive with an IBM or a Microsoft rival. One way to do that was to make sure Oracle database plus apps run really well on freebie operating systems like Linux. And on bare-bones, on-the-cheap blade servers from Dell and others.
As we all know, nothing raises McNealy's hackles like mention of Dell or cheap servers. Except for mention cheap servers FROM Dell.
Slowly but surely Sun and McNealy came around. Both Red Hat and SUSE Linux are supported and sold by Sun and the world did not end.
Even some open sourcers acknowledge that Solaris remains superior to Linux in many ways, and said Sun has made strides in making Solaris more affordable.
"Why go for Linux if Solaris is price competitive? There is no reason," declared one longtime Oracle/Sun partner.
At any rate, Sun rocked the boat with Oracle, leaking stories about new Solaris 10 support of PostgreSQL.
Oracle partners report that in the past year or so, Sun's field sales force has been pushing (gasp) IBM's DB2 over Oracle's database. Perhaps that had an impact as well.
In any case, last month's news that Oracle was favoring the new UltraSPARC t! chip with better per-core pricing was extremely interesting given Oracle's past embrace of Intel/AMD architectures.
Cynics might wonder what "the next phase of the Sun/Oracle alliance" mentioned in the mail will be? Could Scooter be crewing the big boat with Larry? Maybe Larry will play right wing for Scooter's hockey team?
Just please, please, PLEASE DON'T TELL ME that Oracle is buying Sun.
That would simply be too much to bear.