Ellison: Sun losing millions, keeping MySQL

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 05:38

IT Industry - Strategy

Ellison has said before that the combination of Oracle software and Sun hardware would make the combined company an unparalleled systems vendor.

In May, he mentioned Apple and Cisco as examples of how companies can succeed by running their own software on their own hardware.

In yesterday's forum, though, he aimed even higher, citing the dominance of IBM in the '50s and '60s.

"I would like us to be the successor to IBM," he said, according to The Register. But he singled out the IBM of Thomas Watson, Jr., who became IBM's president in 1952 and stepped down as chairman and CEO in 1971.

"That's when IBM was really the dominant software company," said Ellison, saying that he wanted to deliver hardware-software systems that would run most of the enterprises in America.

He reiterated his intention to keep all of Sun's technologies, calling the company "a national treasure for the last couple of decades."

For example, he said, "Solaris is way better than [IBM's] AIX."