Oracle Drops Sun Cloud, Will Push Integrated Stack

Yesterday was a historic day in the computer and business world, as Oracle officially completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Larry Ellison claimed he wants the Oracle of 2010 to be the IBM of the 1960s. Hello, mainframe and integrated software and hardware. With news that Oracle was killing the Sun Cloud, it appears clear that they will take a very pragmatic approach to developing and selling computing to customers. No on-demand platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Oracle.

So, while Ellison called everything a cloud, thereby rendering the term fairly meaningless from his perspective, it's pretty clear that he's going to compete very differently than Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce.com, and even the IBM of today. Cloud computing is not Oracle's strategic direction. They're betting most customers want integrated systems that they run in-house, in their own datacenter. That is quite a bit different from the promise of cloud computing. Or the reality, if one considers the momentum of Amazon and others.

Again, it appears that Oracle is going to compete head-on with cloud computing vendors by offering things that are very different. Oracle wants customers to invest in infrastructure and software. At the very most, they'll be willing to sell customers their very own private cloud. And many argue, like Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels, that the very notion of a private cloud is anathema to cloud computing. Others give private clouds a pass--usually as a bridge to public cloud computing. But, most people, at least in the cloud world, think the future and innovation lie in the direction of (public) cloud computing.

So, what else can we make of the decision by Oracle to drop the Sun Cloud? To me it's a somewhat risky decision because it puts Oracle (and Sun's) developer and independent software vendor (ISV) community at risk for them. These communities -- including the Java developer community -- are critical for the success of platform players like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc. Most of these platform players are innovating like crazy to develop platform as a service (PaaS) offerings upon which they can build the next great wave of developer and ISV ecosystems. And that translates into the next great wave of innovation. And innovation results in revenue.

Somehow, I can't believe Oracle would take this risk. And, therefore, I expect an about-face on this front in the next year or two. Marking the success of Windows Azure will be quite interesting to see. If it and other PaaS take off, I expect Oracle will have to modify its back to the '60s routine.

There has been some very good analysis covering the details of yesterday's event. I've highlighted some of my favorites below.

Peace, love, and the IBM System 360s - John Rymer, Forrester Research

Oracle and Sun - Quick Analysis - Michael Cote, RedMonk

Oracle + Sun: Five questions to ponder - Judith Hurwitz, Cloud-Centric Weblog