Despite Ellison assurances, Sun customers remain uncertain

The JavaOne conference, the annual Java technical event staged by Sun Microsystems last week in San Francisco, was noteworthy not for groundbreaking new additions to the platform but for a surprise appearance by the executive who soon will be in charge of Sun's critical Java implementation: Larry Ellison.

Oracle CEO Ellison appeared briefly onstage to offer assurances to the Java community at large that Oracle -- which is buying Sun -- was among them as adherents to the Java platform. "We see increased investments in Java coming from the Sun-Oracle combination and an expansion of the overall community, and we're very excited about that," Ellison says.

[ For full coverage of JavaOne, see InfoWorld's special report. ]

But attendees remained skeptical in part about how the future of Java and Sun technologies will play out, wondering what would happen with projects such as the GlassFish open source application server. Oracle has been largely silent about the fate of specific Sun products. Attendees did not even get any assurances from Oracle that the JavaOne event itself would be continued by Oracle in coming years.

Sun's prized status as a place of cultural innovation now is in question, says Miko Matsumura, chief software strategist at Software AG, which occasionally competes with Oracle in the database market. "I think people right now are broadly questioning [Ellison's] commitment to I guess [what] I would call the inventive culture that Sun has fostered for so many years," he adds.

"I think there's a lot of things that are a bit regrettable about [the merger], but one [is that] ... it's kind of a reach for them be going out into systems," he says, since Oracle has not been a hardware company before.

Where users and developers have doubts
Another attendee, Kurt Zoglmann, a systems analyst at Kansas State University, says the merger presents opportunities but also puts doubts in people's minds. "The opportunity is there for some vertical integration for the two companies to be more efficient as a whole," with the ability to package Sun technologies with the complete Oracle database, he says.

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