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Talk about advertising traction.
After Oracle ran an ad in some editions of the Sept. 10 The Wall St. Journal, the technology media and bloggers have been buzzing about what’s contained in the six-sentence annnouncement and what isn’t.
In the ad, Oracle informs Sun customers that it intends to:
-‘Spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now.’
-`Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now.’
-‘Have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris systems than Sun does now.’
-‘Dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.’
The ad closes with a quote attributed to Larry Ellison: “We’re in it to win it. IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business.”
Since the ad was published, some pundits and bloggers have questioned why there’s no mention of Sun’s open source database, MySQL, which is at the heart of an investigation by the European Commission as it considers Oracle’s $7.4 billion bid for Sun. Others are scratching their heads wondering why Oracle’s commitment to Java wasn’t spelled out in the ad.
It’s pretty obvious that Oracle is taking steps to reassure Sun’s tentative hardware customers. Prior to placing the ad, Oracle executives have said little to nothing about its plans for Sun’s hardware business since announcing its intent to acquire Sun in April. Since then, IBM and HP have aggressively pursued Sun’s installed base of hardware customers. They appear to be having some success.
According to a recent IDC report on the state of the worldwide server market, Sun’s second-quarter server revenues fell 37% to $981 million, the biggest percentage drop among major server vendors for that period. Overall, the global server market fell 30.1% year-over-year for the second quarter and the fourth consecutive decline for this market, according to IDC.
After the EC extended its investigation of the Sun deal on Sept. 3 by up to four months, Larry Ellison & Co. had to take some kind of action to stem the bleeding to Sun’s hardware business. The Wall St. Journal ad doesn’t prevent Oracle from selling off Sun’s hardware business at some point. Plus, it’s pretty easy for Oracle to make claims that it intends to spend more on SPARC and Solaris development than Sun is “now.” As the deal sits in limbo, Sun is likely holding off on pumping R&D money into SPARC or Solaris. So any planned investments by Oracle in these areas would likely be greater than whatever Sun is spending at the moment.
Oracle’s advertisement isn’t about reading tea leaves. It’s about retaining the value of Sun’s hardware business.
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