Ellison wants Oracle to be like Apple or Cisco

By Jake Widman
Friday, 08 May 2009 23:56

Development

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has vowed to maintain Sun's hardware business as part of a plan for Oracle to build combined hardware/software systems.

In an e-mail interview with Reuters, the Oracle chief pointed to Apple and Cisco as examples of companies that are able to maintain high margins because they design their own hardware to run their software.

Ellison cited the success of the company's Exadata "database machine" -- built by HP and based on Intel chips -- as an example of the kind of system he thinks Oracle can build.

However, he implied that new systems would be built using Sun's SPARC chips, developed to run Oracle software.

"Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa," Ellison wrote. "For example, SPARC is much more energy-efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per-socket basis."

That reduces the power requirements (and cost) for a data center run on SPARC machines, Ellson said. But the main attraction for Oracle of designing its own chips, he continued, was to be able to implement some system features in the chip for improved performance.

Ellison also claimed that Oracle would keep Sun's storage and backup businesses.

Meanwhile, though, Sun faces three lawsuits aimed at blocking the merger.

For more on Oracle and Sun, see Page 2.