October 13, 2009

Oracle co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz had a tough act to follow after last night -- with their boss Larry Ellison issuing a challenge to IBM and Sun's Scott McNealy delivering a nostalgic look at the past and future of the company he co-founded.

But they tried, talking about about what they described as the "backstory" of Oracle's integration strategy. In doing so, Phillips and Catz also offered a look at Oracle's thinking behind not just its acquisition of Sun, but of all of its acquisitions to date.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has long been thought of as a database company. But with applications, middleware, developer tools and a virtualization platform, it today offers much more than just a relational database.

A large part of that comes as a result of the company's 59 acquisitions, which so far have yielded some 3,000 products, Phillips noted. And when Oracle gobbles up companies, it takes products and increases investment in them -- it does not decrease them, he added. We'll do what we've always done: make the products better," Phillips told the audience. "After 59 acquisitions, we think we have a track record of doing this."

The comments were as close as Phillips came to addressing the Sun audience directly -- particularly users of the Sun-backed MySQL database software, the future which has been the subject of much speculation following Oracle's bid to purchase Sun. Concerns over what might become of MySQL have even prompted European regulators to investigate the merger.

But Phillips aimed to drive home the notion that Oracle is serious about improving on all of the products it acquires, noting that it has an annual R&D budget of $3 billion and more than 20,000 developers, a figure that will be increased once Sun comes on board.

Source:- http://www.internetnews.com