Ellison, McNealy Tout Advantages Of Oracle-Sun Combination

McNealy's often-wistful remembrances of Sun's past accomplishments also sounded very much like his swan song. "I really have enjoyed the last 25 years," the Sun co-founder said during an opening keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. McNealy stepped down as Sun's CEO in 2006.

A slide McNealy showed to sum up Sun's history sounded like an epitaph: "Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever."

The Ellison-McNealy effort seemed largely designed to counter questions about Oracle's plans for Sun's products, particularly its server and storage hardware, after the $7.4 billion acquisition is complete. Some Sun channel partners, worried about the future of Sun products, have been mulling adding IBM and Hewlett-Packard servers to their offerings.

Oracle's plan to acquire Sun has been delayed while the European Commission investigates whether the deal, which includes Sun's MySQL open-source database, would violate European anti-trust laws.

McNealy offered a list of what he considered to be Sun's greatest innovations, including the Sparc microprocessor, NFS networking technology, Java programming language and Solaris operating system.

(Earlier McNealy, famous for his humorous Top 10 lists, also offered a list of the kind of strange inventions that are created when "engineers go wild." The list included a USB drive that looks like Sushi, a bra that doubles as a gas maskand Windows 7. "They're not the ones I would have done if the lawyers hadn't been all over me," McNealy said of the lists.)

"It's dazzeling thinking about all the innovations that have come from Sun in the last few decades," Ellison said, taking the stage after McNealy. He said combining Oracle and Sun's technology would let Oracle "do things that neither company could think of doing by themselves."

Oracle executives have said the acquisition will allow the company to develop complete systems, from hardware, up through the operating system and middleware, to applications.

Oracle, in advertisements in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, has promised to spend more on developing Sparc and Solaris than Sun does today. Ellison repeated those vows Sunday. He also dismissed worries that Oracle might discontinue MySQL, arguing that the open-source database and the Oracle flagship database compete in very different markets.

"We hope this removes some of the uncertainty," Ellison said.

Pitching the advantages of the Sun acquisition was also on the agenda at the Oracle PartnerNetwork Forum, the partner program segment of Oracle OpenWorld where Oracle president Charles Phillips said combining the two companies would be good for solution providers.

"It's really the answer to the high cost of ownership that customers have struggled with," he said of being able to sell complete hardware/software systems. "It will be a big competitive differentiator for us and for you," Phillips said to hundreds of attending Oracle resellers.

Ellison, wrapping up his keynote, also engaged in some trash talking about Oracle's rivalry with IBM, which he said has sought to win away Sun customers. Much of his speech was devoted to touting the power of the Exadata database machine, built on Sun hardware and Oracle software, over competing IBM products.

"At Sun and Oracle, we're going to focus on building smarter computers," Ellison said in a dig at IBM's "smarter planet" advertising campaign. "If IBM wants to compete, we'll compete."