Oracle outlines post merger roadmap

Bangalore: After finalizing the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is now reassuring customers that they can rely on the newly combined entity to support their UltraSparc and Solaris based systems among other things, if they're willing to buy integrated hardware/software packages, reports Information Week.

Oracle will now add software, including its 11g database, Oracle business applications and Fusion middleware, to UltraSparc servers along with the operating system. Customers can also get virtualization software from Oracle in the form of Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Management. All the pieces will be certified to work together and optimized for maximum performance.

"Our vision for 2010 is the same as IBM's in the 1960s," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison after the briefing at Oracle headquarters in California. Noting that IBM, integrated hardware with software and sold the combination as the mainframe, which became the centerpiece of the datacenter, he said, "We like that strategy a lot and we're going to adopt it."

According to Information Week, despite the focus on combined hardware/software products, Ellison took pains to emphasize that Oracle will continue to sell separate products. "That doesn't mean we're getting out of the component business. Our goal is to build the best of breed componentsand we're going to integrate those components together into hardware appliances. We can deliver better integration than IBM," Ellison said.