Sun and Oracle reaffirm alliance

Sun Microsystems and Oracle have renewed their agreement to co-operate in development, sales and marketing efforts. 

"We want to make a very clear statement to both employee bases that we are collaborative, we are co-operating, we are integrated and we are going to market together against some fairly formidable competition," Sun chief executive Scott McNealy said at an event at Oracle's corporate headquarters.

"The two companies are 're-upping' big time in terms of the amount of dollars for engineering and marketing."

The partnership, which goes back more than 20 years, has made Oracle the number one database supplier on Sun hardware, while Sun claims the position of running the most Oracle databases.

As part of the partnership refresh, Oracle has renewed its licence for the Sun-owned Java programming language for a further 10 years.

Sun plans to start selling hardware bundles with the Oracle database preinstalled, allowing the customer to use the database free of charge for a year including support.

Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison touted Sun's AMD-powered Galaxy servers and the new T1 systems, pointing to the option for users to pool them in a grid under the Oracle 10g grid-enabled database.