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Ellison, McNealy Tout Technology Innovation

By Rich Schwerin

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems Chairman of the Board and cofounder Scott McNealy kicked off Oracle OpenWorld 2009 with a humorous keynote presentation last night. McNealy's classic top 10 list poked fun at engineers "gone wild," then shifted to a more serious list: Sun's technology innovation. "Innovation is at the core of Sun. We are a products company with significant R&D," said McNealy.

Touting a variety of innovative Sun technologies—Solaris,SunRay thin client, chip multithreading—McNealy then introduced the "father of Java," Sun vice president and fellow James Gosling. "I've never worked for a software company, so it'll be an adventure," said Gosling. "They won't be a software company after we get done with them," McNealy replied.

Ellison took the stage next. "It's dazzling thinking of all the innovations that have come from Sun," said Ellison. "It's enormously exciting to combine and merge these technologies and that's our goal—to tackle even bigger problems by delivering revolutionary systems." Ellison reiterated Oracle's commitment to Sun technology, customers, and open-source software. "We have an open source database called Sleepy Cat and we own Innobase and we've increased our investments in both," said Ellison. "We are going to increase Sun's investment in MySQL, and I think we have a track record of doing that" with other open-source acquisitions.

Ellison pointed to advertisements highlighting Oracle's plans to spend more money developing SPARC and Solaris than Sun does now. "We're in it to win," said Ellison. "We look forward to competing with IBM in the systems business." Ellison also discussed new world-record benchmarks, including a new Oracle advertisement. Ellison said, "Win $10 million if your database application does not run twice as fast on Sun hardware. IBM, you're welcome to enter."