Considering the harsh competition on the technology and IT market, it’s no wonder that sometimes the most unlikely alliances are formed. And one such alliance is the one that has been established between Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
And recently, the two companies held a huge meeting for their employees, in which they have renewed their vows as partners to one another.
As reported by eWeek, Sun CEO Scott McNealy started Tuesday’s “town meeting” session for media and employees at Oracle headquarters by dispelling rumors that the two companies might be poised to announce a merger.
But when he turned to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison for confirmation, he only heard hems and haws. “A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will do,” McNealy said.
“You’ll see the newspapers,” Ellison blurted finally before observing, “Oracle’s strong preference is to do everything hostile.”
But the last chance of any really significant news went out the window when McNealy reaffirmed that a merger was “not what we are here to talk about.”
Instead, McNealy and Ellison announced that Oracle had agreed to license Java for 10 more years and that Oracle will support the NetBeans open-source integrated development environment for Java applications as part of its collaboration.
Sun and Oracle also announced that Sun would be offering a bundle of its servers, Solaris operating system, JES and Oracle middleware, and the Oracle 10g database on its Sun Fire servers using the dual-core UltraSparc-IV and UltraSparc-IV+ processors that would essentially give away the Oracle 10g license to those Sun buyers, including a one-year contract for support from Oracle. “We are going to take the hit and basically you are going to get the Oracle database license for free with one year’s support,” said McNealy. He said that the bundle would mean that a Sun-Oracle server and software stack would be about 25 percent less than a similar bundle on an IBM pSeries Unix server. “The bigger the machine, the cooler this gets,” bragged McNealy.
The Opteron-based “Galaxy” servers and the new Sun Fire T series servers that use the “Niagara” 32-thread T1 processors apparently are not getting the bundle. But Oracle recently announced special pricing on these machines that brings the costs on these machines in line with other platforms with fewer cores and about the same processing power. But that doesn’t mean that eventually Sun and Oracle might not decide to do the same thing on Opteron machines. You see, Oracle 10g Release 2, the current release, is not yet certified to run on Sun’s Galaxy servers when running Solaris, so it is not really something Sun could bundle and take the hit on to offer compelling bang for the buck. Ellison hemmed and hawed about why the Solaris-Opteron platform is taking so long to get certified, and then said simply that it was a matter of the chicken-and-egg problem, that there wasn’t very much customer demand for it. However, this new ten-year deal addresses that problem, said Ellison, and Oracle 10g R2 will soon be certified on the Solaris-Opteron platform, and presumably will come out in lock-step with Sparc and other platforms in the future. That is what a preferred platform should mean, at least.
However, the two companies are not completely faithful to one another.
The Oracle database and applications run on virtually every significant computer platform on the market. Ellison indicated that Oracle would continue to fully support its products on Linux and on Dell servers, which are directly competitive with Sun’s products.
Meanwhile, McNealy said that Sun would continue to work with Microsoft on solving interoperability issues between Windows, Solaris and Java, but he wouldn’t discuss the status of these efforts in any detail.

Well, it seems that this strange relationship, which started over 20 years ago, will continue well into the 21’st century, as it proves to be quite a lucrative one.