A Commitment to Standards
Oracle and Sun hold a town hall gathering to commemorate their partnership history and reaffirm a new 10-year, Java-based collaboration.
by Terrence O'Donnell

January 19, 2006

Sun CEO Scott McNealy (left) with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

Marking the passage of more than two decades of "visionary alignment" and "joint leadership in network computing," Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, and Scott McNealy, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Sun Microsystems, conducted a town hall gathering of Oracle and Sun employees and members of the industry press to make a general announcement that also promoted the next decade of their partnership. Ellison and McNealy took the stage together in an informal setting to speak about their shared vision to advance open standards, develop Java-based products, and aggressively go after competitors committed to proprietary-based technologies.

Both chief executives acknowledged a relatively harmonious partnership over the last 20 years, and the town hall event held January 10 at Oracle headquarters largely reaffirmed both organizations' continued commitment to Java, community collaboration, and the common goal of chipping away at the market share of companies supporting proprietary technologies—obvious references to Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, in particular.

"Oracle's been standards-based from the very beginning," Ellison said. "With Sun it's the same, and it's very important that we go down that route. When you go to technology-based standards it means that you have to get beat up by some performance and service quality—and that's a good thing—as opposed to some of our competitors, like Microsoft, who go off in other proprietary directions." Ellison said that Oracle is comfortable that the standards will do very well in the marketplace against proprietary approaches.

"The reason we made this a town-hall kind of conversation is that we want to make a very clear statement to both employee bases that we are collaborative, we're cooperating, we're integrating, and we're going to market together against some fairly formidable competition," McNealy said. "We may have fun with it and all the rest of it, but that's a sign of respect when you give them grief. We definitely are giving a clear message to our employees that we're on the same side here and on the same team, and we're driving that forward."

Later in the conversation, when both chief executives opened the floor to questions from the audience, McNealy was asked about a recent announcement by Sun concerning greater collaboration with Microsoft, its progress, and its implications for the Sun-Oracle relationship. Following Ellison's, "I know that question could not have been addressed to me" quip, McNealy opted out, saying: "We're not going to go there in this conversation. This is all about our partnership with Oracle. Every year or so we announce the progress on our Microsoft relationship, but I don't think this is the forum," adding, "I wouldn't feel right in this room doing that."

Among the more significant facets of the joint announcement, Sun will bundle the enterprise edition of the Oracle Database 10g software as an option on its high-end, UltraSPARC processor servers, which will include one year of free support from Oracle, and Oracle is committing to a 10-year license to develop on the Java platform. Other aspects of the announcement included affirmation of Solaris 10 as the standard 64-bit development platform going forward, Oracle's endorsement of the NetBeans tool platform, and Sun's migration of its internal ERP systems to the latest and greatest new release of the Oracle ERP platform.

The Java Route
Despite some areas of acrimony over the years, technology contributions from both companies have been highly complementary.

"If you think about it, there's not much in the data center that needs technology outside our two companies," McNealy said. "If you think about what we can put together, it's a pretty interesting combination, and more interestingly, it works together, it all plays together, it's hot pluggable, hot swappable, integratable, and tested certified in scale. 'No IBM Global Services required' is another way to put that."

Ellison concurred, and cited the significance of Java. "I can't emphasize how important Java is to Oracle. We have based our entire middleware strategy on Java and J2EE. Java controls our integration approach. Everything is really built around Java, so much so that we're rewriting all of our business applications in Java, and we're continuing to modernize our software stack and standardize our software stack. I think that's very important."

Ellison compared their Java-based strategy and commitment to open standards to the strategies of certain competitors, such as SAP, which he said believes in modernizing their applications without changing them.

"They keep writing programs in a language called ABAP, which is a 25-year-old proprietary language, not related to Java yet it has the same number of letters in the name, but it really is old, proprietary technology," Ellison said. "We're betting that standards win. We're betting that modern technology beats old technology. We're betting that developers and users prefer having standards-based technologies."

In terms of standards, McNealy gave a nod to Oracle's efforts as an important leading contributor to the Java Community Process (JCP).

"There are 950 Java Community Process contributors," he said, "but you guys [Oracle] are a steering committee and lead. I love all 950 partners, but some are more contributory and important, and clearly Oracle is right in there in the lead of contributions to the JCP. That's a big statement. We look forward to another 10 years of collaboration."

The event featured some discussion over areas in which Oracle and Sun compete. Both CEOs acknowledged that the two companies have an approximate 5 percent overlap in competition, but that it was important going forward that both adhere to industry standards. McNealy said that for developers the partnership means a solid commitment to Java, strong collaboration efforts, Oracle application development on Sun Solaris servers, a joint outreach to the developer ecosystem, and Oracle's endorsement of the NetBeans initiative.

The informal presentation by both chiefs was marked by a fair amount of frivolity. McNealy tipped off the afternoon by prodding Ellison to deliver the really big announcement:

"So, Larry, everybody here wants to know, right up front—if we can just take this off the table and get the big announcement out of the way—are you buying Sun?"

Ellison stammered a bit, peering out over the audience, as the room reverberated with laughter.

"A simple 'yes' or 'no' will do, Larry," McNealy said.

Ellison said that despite the prospect being interesting, it turns out that Oracle's strong preference is to do it hostilely.

The Oracle-Sun town hall was anything but hostile, however. As McNealy summed it up, though the big news of the day was far from earth-shattering in many respects, it nevertheless reinforced the importance of a solid partnership in the industry and a new 10-year commitment by the two companies to continue to collaborate in Java.

About the Author
Terrence O'Donnell is editor of Java Pro. Contact Terry at .