With a new advertising campaign taunting IBM

Sep 11, 2009 09:37 GMT  ·  By
Oracle launches new advertising campaign taunting IBM with Sun hardware
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   Oracle launches new advertising campaign taunting IBM with Sun hardware

Oracle is facing three more months of scrutiny from European regulators over its intent to buy software and hardware manufacturer Sun Micrsystems. But, while the approval for the deal lingers, Sun hardware sales tank as customers are unsure what Oracle has planned for the division, with many fearing it will be sold or just start selling rebadged hardware. After an appalling fiscal fourth quarter at Sun, Oracle is finally making a commitment, saying it's 100 percent behind the hardware business in a new advertising campaign in Europe.

“We're in it to win it. IBM, we're looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says in the new ad campaign. The implication is that Oracle has big plans for the hardware side, despite having no experience in the field, being a predominantly software-centric company. Oracle goes on to say that it will increase the amount of money aimed at Sparc development and also spend more on the development efforts for Solaris, Sun's own Unix-based operating system. What's more, it pledges to double the number of people selling and servicing Sun's hardware offerings.

Finally, not entirely unexpected, it also claims that its current software products will be “tightly integrated” with Sun hardware. This could actually prove beneficial for the company, despite fears that it wants to have nothing to do with hardware, as having a tailored and fully integrated software-plus-hardware offering could make it an interesting option for some and would allow it to compete with IBM, its biggest rival, on this market as well.

Still, this may all be a little propaganda to ease the worries of the EU's Competition Commission, which has extended its investigation of the deal. But the new ad campaign does nothing to calm the worries of some in the MySQL camp, as there is no mention of the database system, leading some to speculate that its future may not be that secure. However, adding MySQL in the ad campaign made little sense, as it is targeted at an entirely different audience than the one using the database system, which is especially popular among web developers.

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Oracle launches new advertising campaign taunting IBM with Sun hardware
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