Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff

An anonymous reader writes "There's been much speculation as to what Oracle plans to do with Sun once the all-but-certain acquisition is complete. According to separate reports on InfoWorld, Oracle has disclosed plans to continue investing in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. However, Larry Ellison has reportedly said that once the Sun acquisition is complete, Oracle will hire 2,000 new employees — more people than it expects to cut from the Sun workforce. Oracle will present its plans for Sun to the public Wednesday."

All I know about that is...

[Third Position]

...is that the shop I work in is replacing it's Sun, HPUX and AIX servers with Red Hat Linux clusters hand over fist. HP and IBM are making up the lost revenue selling us blade servers, which pretty much leaves Sun out in the cold, given that Sun hasn't really established themselves on commodity hardware. Sun's servers are great, of course, but I'm guessing that without a competitive commodity platform to get their foot in the door, they aren't going to be making most customers A list of vendors when they go shopping for high end hardware.

Trying to cut salaries?

[ErichTheRed]

I wonder what the motivation here is. Oracle isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer. Every time I've had to deal with Oracle products, it's painfully obvious that the people they have intentionally design their software to be difficult to support...and then they hire armies of low-skill consultants to "help" customers install their systems.

(And yes, I understand enterprise-grade software is complex. However, needing someone to guide you through all the quirks in the products or documentation just to get a proof of concept going is sad. I think SAP may be the only worse company in this "doesn't work out of the box" category.)

My guess? Larry is going to wipe out the current long-tenure Sun employees who know everything about Sun's products and replace them with low-skilled, low-salaried n00bs. My further guess would be that these employees would be in lower-wage countries as well.

IBM has been doing stuff like this for a while, from what I've heard...including offering people permanent one-way transfers to India along with the appropriate salary cut. Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!

Re:What about the software?

[five18pm]

Solaris, Java, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, everything is staying according to Thomas Kurian and Ed Screven. Only thing I didn't hear about was OpenSolaris. There is also going to be an Oracle Cloud Office, online docs like Google Docs.

Re:What about the software?

[PCM2]

All of it was mentioned, with the exception of the C, C++, and Fortran compilers.

• I don't remember specific plans for Solaris, other than that it will be the OS running a lot of the Oracle appliances they're talking about.
• Various Java news. Integrating HotSpot with JRocket. Unifying the programming models/API for Java SE and Java ME. Java SE 7 will include support for multi-core and better support for multiple [non-Java] languages.
• Netbeans goes forward as a "lightweight" dev environment, while JDeveloper is the "strategic" platform. Netbeans will get improved support for scripting, dynamic languages, and mobile.
• OpenOffice.org will continue as a separate business unit. As with everything, Oracle is bragging that it plans to boost investment in it. They mentioned an Oracle Cloud Office based on OpenOffice.org, which aims to offer the same experience on the desktop, Web, and mobile (as Microsoft is talking about with Office 2010).

Maybe someone else can fill in more details.

Re:What Kind of 'Hiring?'

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, despite what outsider's think, there is no fear-mongering in Oracle developers. In fact, I can (and have) spoken outspokenly to very senior managers without being "afraid" - they didn't agree to what I said, but there were no repercussions because I said it. Apologies for posting AC, but I like my privacy - and this is personal information.

Re:Employee cuts

[Courageous]

That's not the only problem, believe me. Sun has trouble with pricing their x86 solutions. Dell so thoroughly kills them that the quiet cry of silence I've gotten from my Sun rep any time I've forwarded him a Dell quote in response to one of his has gotten to be pitiable. They have a long row to ho. I suspect that killing off the expensive cruft organization may be part of it.