Sun: Oracle is "committed" to SPARC architecture

Oracle Open World 2009 – Sun MicrosystemsChairman Scott McNealy has confirmed that Oracle will continue to develop SPARC architecture.

“SPARC has good momentum. There are 216,000 Sparc-based servers [currently] on the market and we have sold 7 million processors this decade,” said McNealy. “So, we asked Oracle and Larry Ellison, what are your plans for SPARC? Well, Oracle is committed to SPARC and will spend more money than we have on its development.”

According to McNealy, Ellison also assured Sun that Oracle would continue to fund the development of Solaris – which remains the
“number one platform” for the company.

In addition, McNealy emphasized that Oracle has pledged to ensure a bright future for Java, which is currently present on 2.6 billion mobile phones and 90 percent of all PCs.

“Although [the merger] is in a state of limbo, the big theme here is innovation. Our core is innovation, along with our technology,” explained McNealy. “Combined, Oracle and Sun will have one of the greatest R&D budgets of all time.”

He added that Sun and Oracle were working with the “authorities” to help them understand that Open Source will remain “just that.”

Finally, McNealy noted that MySQL did “not compete” with Oracle’s database.

“MySQL competes with Microsoft SQL Server. It doesn’t compete with Oracle or DB2,” said McNealy.

See Also

Larry Ellison endorses SPARC, criticizes IBM’s Power architecture