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Next week is going to be one of the most important ones in 2010, at least in terms of announcements.
The consumer side of the IT world in fact is going to enjoy the Apple presentation that will take place on Jan. 27, where Steve Jobs is expected to launch the iTablet/iPad or whatever he decided to call it.
The business side of the same IT world instead is probably expecting a significant announcement from VMware, Cisco and NetApp, in the joint presentation that will take place on Jan. 26, despite the absence of Cisco CEO John Chambers (who probably doesn’t want to replicate the show to launch the VMware-Cisco-EMC alliance).
But next week there’s another, even more important, presentation that corporations may want to attend: the Oracle announcement about its strategy with the Sun assets.
Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun in April 2009. The US Department of Justice approved it just four months later. The European Union, instead, took until today to approve the $7.4 billion deal without conditions.
Oracle didn’t waste a second and announced a live webcast scheduled for Jan. 27 to discuss its integration plans and product roadmaps.
Larry Ellison must be looking for some sort of head to head competition with Steve Jobs since the Oracle presentation will start just one hour before the Apple one (9am PST) and will finish much later (2pm PST).
The invitation doesn’t specifically mention virtualization, but it involves other critical aspects of the Oracle strategy that may impact the virtualization landscape:
Find out how Oracle + Sun goes beyond your expectations to:
- Offer a broad range of products including servers, storage, networking, and software
- Integrate all the components–hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications–for unmatched performance, reliability, and security
- Simplify IT management and reduce system deployment and integration costs
- Continue to drive innovation in SPARC, Solaris, the Java platform, and many other technologies
In September 2009 virtualization.info questioned the Oracle credibility as a major virtualization player.
The Oracle prompt answer started with “First, the Sun acquisition has not closed so we unfortunately cannot discuss that yet.” So we expect that Oracle will have much to say next week or immediately after.