PETALING JAYA: Sun Microsystems is shining brightly at Oracle Inc, which acquired it earlier this year and is now busy integrating the products of both companies.
Cheryl Martin, senior director of marketing for Sun Systems at Oracle, said Oracle wants Sun’s Solaris operating system to work seamlessly with its stable of database, rack and fusion middleware products.
“We test everything so that our customers get the best in performance and security,” she said.
Martin was in town as part of an Oracle worldwide tour to highlight its best practices for optimising datacentre efficiency through its Oracle+Sun product strategy. The acquisition was finalised in January.
According to her, Oracle and Sun customers are supportive of the union because it allows for more innovative solutions to their database needs.
Furthermore, with Sun and Oracle under one roof, Martin said, the customers will enjoy more rapid releases of such solutions, offering better performances, network security, and system reliability.
The acquisition will also give even more clout to Oracle’s storage solutions, according to Martin.
Oracle’s offerings can be made better with the data management and protection capabilities that Sun has, as customers move from just storing data to properly managing it, she said.
One of the first successful results from such integrations is Oracle Exadata, which comprises Oracle software with industry-standard Sun hardware.
Martin said the product is popular with businesses because of its short deployment time. A customer in Australia, she said, received a unit on a Friday and was able to get everything up and running by Tuesday.
“Businesses used to take weeks and months to get such a system up and running. Exadata helps them do that faster,” she said.
Big plans
She said customers can expect all sorts of new innovations to come from the union of Sun and Oracle. One of these is the Solaris operating system, which Oracle will continue to invest in.
There are also big plans for Flash memory. With it, Oracle’s storage solutions will be smarter in knowing where to store data, especially when the system utilises both disk and tape technologies.
“If certain data is accessed more often than other information, it will be stored in Flash memory for faster access. The rest can be stored on hard disks or tape for retrieval,” Martin explained.
She said this combination can bring storage costs for businesses down from US$16,000 (RM51,000) per terrabyte on systems running solely on disk technology, to a mere US$4,000 (RM13,000).
Oracle and Sun will also be expanding into each other’s customer base, and will focus on the financial services sector.
“Before the acquisition, almost all of Sun’s customers were also Oracle’s but only 10% of Oracle’s customers were Sun’s, so there’s a huge opportunity within the Oracle customer base for a lot of expansion,” Martin said.
Oracle will announce more Oracle+Sun products at the company’s annual software development event — Oracle OpenWorld — next month.
