Oracle Call Sun Acquisition A Good Deal...accused of neglecting inherited consumers

Oracle is close to resuming growth in its hardware business, according to Oracle executives who, three years after spending $7.4 billion to buy Sun Microsystems, say the acquisition has more than paid for itself.

"The cash flow has far exceeded the value" of what Oracle paid for Sun, Oracle president Mark Hurd said in response to a question during a conference call with journalists recently.

Hurd also said the technologies that came with the acquisition, including Java development tools and server hardware, have helped the company develop new products. The most obvious example is Sun's server technology, which forms the foundation of the company's "Engineered Systems" products, including the Exadata and Exalogics servers and the SPARC SuperCluster servers.

Oracle's hardware sales have been steadily declining since Oracle bought Sun three years ago. In the second quarter ended Nov. 30, Oracle's hardware systems sales declined 23 percent year-over-year to $734 million, accounting for 8 percent of the company's total sales.

When revenue from hardware systems support is added to the mix, hardware accounted for a little over $1.3 billion in second-quarter sales -- about 15 percent of total revenue for the quarter.

Oracle executives have maintained that hardware sales are declining as the company discontinues sales of commodity server products, focusing instead on value-added products such as the Engineered Systems that combine hardware with Oracle software. Oracle also discontinued OEM sales of several storage system products from other vendors, focusing instead on the Sun ZFS line of storage products.

"We've been very particular and deliberate to focus on our value-add strategy," Hurd said during the media call Monday. He said Engineered Systems saw 70 percent sequential growth in sales bookings in the second quarter.

When asked when hardware sales would resume growing, Hurd said: "We're right about at that crossroads." That echoed statements by CEO Larry Ellison on the second-quarter earnings call in December when he said the company was "just about finished with the downsizing phase" and about to "start growing our hardware business.

Meanwhile Java has continued to prove a security nightmare for years. Part of the problem, as observed by InfoWorld Security Adviser Roger Grimes, is that companies neglect to turn off Java or to even roll out security patches as they emerge. The reason: "It's the number of mission-critical enterprise apps tied to specific Java versions. In case after case, IT security people say they can't patch Java in a more timely manner because doing so breaks too many vital applications."

Can Java be repaired, though? More important, has Oracle made an effort to find out? Krebs raised that very question as he called out the company for being negligent of the customers it unwittingly acquired when it consumed Sun in 2010:

"I feel strongly that Oracle is an enterprise software company that -- through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 -- suddenly found itself on hundreds of millions of consumer systems. Much of the advice on how to lock down Java on consumer PCs simply doesn't scale in the enterprise, and vice-versa. Oracle's unprecedented four-day turnaround on a patch for the last zero-day flaw notwithstanding, the company lacks any kind of outward sign of awareness that its software is so broadly installed on consumer systems. Oracle seems to be sending a message that it doesn't want hundreds of millions of consumer users; those users should listen and respond accordingly".

Zsolt Sandor, a veteran Java developer, said until Oracle gives Java a much-needed thorough code review, browsers makers should develop a Java applet whitelist, such that browsers simply would not allow unapproved applets from executing. "This would solve the 99.9 percent of the cases until the code review is made, and fixes are done," he wrote.