REDWOOD SHORES, CA — On the day Oracle Corp. finally completed its nine-month quest to acquire Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, company officials on Wednesday said their plan is to create a vertically integrated systems company capable of delivering optimized and tested solutions that are based entirely on Oracle technologies, from processor chips to applications.
“Our vision for 2010 is the same as IBM’s vision [was] for 1960,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to customers, analysts and press here. Noting that Oracle’s rival once grew to dominate the information technology industry by controlling most elements of the technology stack, Ellison added, “It’s not like this hasn’t been done before.”
Ellison and other executives said Oracle’s move to combine Sun’s hardware and operating system with Oracle’s applications, middleware, and database products will benefit customers by delivering increased system performance, improved maintenance offerings, and better support from a single vendor — Oracle.
Company officials also promised to increase research and development investments in Sun products such as the Solaris operating system, Sparc microprocessors, the Java development language and tools, and the MySQL open source database management system. Oracle President Charles Phillips told customers the company expects to increase its R&D spending in the current fiscal year to $4.3 billion. Last year, Oracle spent $2.8 on R&D. In 2005, the year Oracle acquired application provider Peoplesoft, the company spent $1.5 billion on R&D.