Ellison Keeps the SPRAC Alive?

Here’s a story I’m surprised hasn’t gotten a lot more play: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says he plans to not only keep the Sun’s SPARC microprocessor technology alive, but to increase investment in it (assuming Oracle’s acquisition of Sun passes European antitrust review.

SPARC processors were one half of Sun’s one-two punch (the other being its Solaris operating system) that drove its success, especially in the financial services business, before the dot-com bust. Since then, Sun has been wandering from one strategy to another, essentially giving up on promoting SPARC in favor of storage and server hardware based on Intel’s X86 architecture just like everyone else on the planet.

Does this mean Oracle is going to be selling SPARC-based notebooks? No way, says Ellison. He wants to compete with IBM as a “systems” company (read: hardware and software combined) that can take on the really big jobs like running airline reservation or banking systems. In fact, he says, his model for Oracle is IBM when it was the prime “systems” company that determined the competitive environment in which all other vendors played.

Ellison’s vision seems to be tweaking future versions of SPARC to run with Solaris and Oracle to deliver really great database, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. But isn’t that what Sun has tried to do for years with SPARC, without notable success? Haven’t a lot of the big SPARC-based Sun boxes always run Oracle databases? Can Ellison, who grew up in the software, not the hardware business succeed where Sun couldn’t? And does SPARC actually have the oomph to differentiate future Sun/Oracle software? (Some analysts say maybe; others doubt it.)

If Ellison sticks to his word, SPARC could reemerge as a competitor to Intel’s X86 architecture – not in the commodity desktop and server space, but in the more rarified world of specialized database and storage servers and network switches. Among the targets are not only IBM itself, of course,  but Cisco with its Unified Computing System push into the server market. Give Ellison credit, at least, for keeping competition alive and reaching for the next big Brass Ring instead of just hunkering down to get through the recession.