MySQL is in safe hands with Oracle, at least according to CEO Larry Ellison.
At an industry gathering in Silicon Valley Monday, the Oracle chief spoke about the legal clouds hovering over the Sun-Oracle deal. Although Sun is losing $100 million a month due to the delay in consummating the merger, he insisted that Oracle will not spin off MySQL just to win approval from the EU.
Interviewed at a Churchill Club event by former Sun and Motorola chief Ed Zander, Ellison maintained that despite EU concerns, Oracle's database does not compete with MySQL.
"MySQL and Oracle do not compete at all," said Ellison. "If you look at where we compete it's with DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Sybase, and a long list of others. We never compete against mySQL, it addresses very different markets."
Ellison pointed out that the U.S. Justice Department has already okayed the merger as pro-competition and that once the EU does its job, it will come to the same conclusion. He expressed the need to complete the deal quickly to keep Sun going and to save as many jobs as possible. "The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose," said the CEO.
Ellison also addressed concerns that Oracle might jettison Sun's hardware business.
"We are keeping everything," said Ellison. "We're keeping tape. We're keeping storage. We're keeping x86 technology and SPARC technology--and we're going to increase the investment in it. Sun has fantastic technology. We think it's got great microprocessor technology--it needs a little more investment, but we think it can be extremely competitive."
The Oracle chief laid out his plans for the future of a combined Sun-Oracle. He sees the new entity as not a hardware or software vendor, but as a systems company. As a leading example to follow, he cited the old IBM.
"I would like us to be the successor to IBM," he said. "Not Gerstner's IBM. Not Palmisano's IBM. But when IBM was the dominant software company in the world and translated that to being the dominant systems company."
Now Ellison believes he can successfully compete with IBM. "We think with the combination of Sun technology and Oracle technology we can succeed and beat IBM," he said, "That's our goal."
Ellison also countered the claim that HP and IBM have taken advantage of the regulatory confusion to steal customers from Sun.
"IBM said it's got 250 customers from Sun," Ellison said. "What does that mean? I don't think there's a single example of any customer who replaced all their Sun machines with IBM. Solaris is way better than AIX, and Sun machines are faster than IBM's and they cost less."
How much longer will Ellison extend his 32-year career at the helm of the company he co-founded? "I'll go for five more years and see how it's going," he said.
The $7.4 billion Sun-Oracle merger has been in a holding pattern since the EU opened an in-depth investigation earlier this month. The EU has given itself a deadline of mid-January to render a final decision, potentially putting the deal months behind its original closing date of mid August.
Oracle is touting its alliance with Sun.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Oracle isn't letting a pesky EU investigation stand in the way of its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Larry Ellison, the software giant's chief executive, is joining Sun's server chief, John Fowler, to show off some new Sun hardware running Oracle's software on Tuesday. The companies are touting their "partnership" with a jointly branded "Exadata" system shown in a Webcast invitation sent to press and published by both Oracle and Sun.
"You are invited to attend an exclusive webcast event where Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will unveil an innovative new product, the world's first OLTP (online transaction processing) database machine with Sun's brand new FlashFire technology," the invitation said. "Don't miss this opportunity to learn firsthand how the partnership between Oracle and Sun can benefit your business now and in the future."
Sun has been working on systems that take advantage of solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash memory to store data rather than traditional hard drives with rotating platters that can store data in tiny magnetic patches. One advantage of such systems is that it's easier to retrieve data scattered in different locations over a drive, which can make reading and writing data faster. However, flash drives cost much more per gigabyte to store data than traditional hard drives.
Notable here is that Oracle is helping preserve the value of the asset it hopes to acquire. As Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice observes, Oracle is trying to counteract IBM and Hewlett-Packard programs to steal away Sun customers who might be hesitating over Sun's current limbo and its inevitable future changes.
Oracle is of course a software company, and one of its biggest challenges in acquiring Sun will be embracing hardware as well, even if it's in some subordinate role that mostly serves as a delivery vehicle for the software. Hardware still takes immense resources to design, qualify, test, manufacturer, and support to compete on the level of IBM and HP.
Tuesday's event telegraphs that Oracle does indeed care about Sun's hardware. So do marketing missives proclaiming that Oracle plans to spend more money developing both servers with Sparc processors and Sun's Solaris operating system than Sun does today.
Oracle doubtless is frustrated by the EU's intransigence, which centers on the open-source MySQL database software that competes with Oracle's own core database product. But it's doing the best it can to keep Sun's hardware business alive.
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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will receive a base salary of $1 for fiscal 2010, according to a regulatory document filed Friday.
That's a decrease of $999,999 from last year. But Ellison won't exactly be starving. He is the world's fourth wealthiest person, according to Forbes.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)And according to Oracle's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ellison's base pay of $1 million in fiscal 2009 only accounted for 1.2 percent of his total compensation anyway. Ninety-seven percent was in the form of stock.
Still, Ellison's new $1 base pay puts him on the salary pedestal with the likes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
"The compensation committee recognizes that Mr. Ellison has a significant equity interest in Oracle, but believes he should still receive annual compensation because Mr. Ellison plays an active and vital role in our operations, strategy and growth. Nevertheless, during fiscal 2010, Mr. Ellison agreed to decrease his annual salary to $1," Oracle said in the filing.
Oracle's fiscal 2010 began June 1.
Ellison, who is 64, founded Oracle in 1977. According to the SEC filing, he owns 1.18 billion shares of Oracle, or 23.4 percent of the company's total stock.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants to see Java on a lot more devices, particularly mobile phones and Netbooks. Whether or not the combined Oracle/Sun builds such devices, Ellison expects to pour more money and research into Java's development.
The tech community has been wondering what will happen to Java now that its new parent will be Oracle, courtesy of the database giant's impending $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems, which is expected to close this summer.
At Tuesday's JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Ellison made a surprise appearance on stage, where he spoke with Sun Chairman Scott McNealy about Java's future.
"I think you'll see us get very aggressive in developing Java apps for things like telephones and Netbooks," said Ellison. He added that he's been reading a lot about mobile devices, including those running Google's Android operating system, that make use of Java. He's looking for greater development of mobile applications using Sun's JavaFX Mobile platform, which is optimized to run on cell phones and Netbooks.
Ellison highlighted Java-based cell phones and netbooks running Android as key areas to target and hinted that Oracle/Sun may want to enter that arena directly. "I can see lots and lots of Java devices, some coming from our friends at Google," said Ellison. "But I don't see why some of those devices shouldn't come from Sun/Oracle."
Hardware makers that have already unveiled or announced phones and Netbooks based on Android include Acer, HTC, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson.
Ellison threw his full support behind Java, reminding the crowd at JavaOne that Oracle's middleware makes good use of Java. He called it an "attractive platform" because of its openness and the ability to extend it. "Everything that sits on top of our database--all our products--are Java-based," he said. He added that Oracle's whole next generation of business applications is built entirely on Java.
When asked by McNealy about the future of Java in general, Ellison said, "Sun has done a fantastic job inventing Java, expanding Java, opening up Java, giving Java to the world, and we're going to do more of the same." He noted that Oracle has invested heavily in Java in the past and believes that investment will continue and even accelerate. "We see increased investment in Java coming from the Sun/Oracle combination," he said.
The full exchange between Ellison and McNealy is available below.
As Oracle heads into 2009, CEO Larry Ellison has a $13.6 million carrot dangling in front of him.
That's the maximum bonus award the billionaire will be eligible for under the company's 2009 bonus plan, which was approved by shareholders during Oracle's annual meeting last week.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing:
Under the Bonus Plan, participants will be eligible to receive awards based upon the attainment, in fiscal 2009, and certification of, certain performance criteria established by the Compensation Committee. For fiscal 2009:(a) Mr. Ellison, our Chief Executive Officer; Mr. (Jeff) Henley, our Chairman of the Board; Ms. (Safra) Catz, a President and our Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. (Charles) Phillips, a President, will each receive an award based on Oracle's improvement in its pre-tax profit on a non-GAAP basis from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.
But no matter how Catz, Phillips or any other executives perform under the plan, it is based on a fixed multiple of their target bonus and is less than the maximum $13.6 million Ellison is eligible to receive under the plan.
Such a cap is interesting, considering how little the maximum bonus may serve to motivate Ellison, who topped the Forbes list of the best-paid tech CEOs in 2007, with his $1 million base salary and $182 million in exercised and vested stock options. In 2008, Ellison's compensation package again included a $1 million base salary, but the value of his exercised and vested options was a staggering $543.8 million.
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