SAN FRANCISCO: Those predicting the worst for Sun Microsystems Inc as the company awaits the final approval of its acquisition by business software giant Oracle Corp were told in no uncertain terms that the sun is not due to set on the enterprise systems vendor any time soon.

At the opening keynote of the Oracle OpenWorld conference here, Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy and Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison stressed that all of Sun’s key technologies — Sparc processor architecture, Solaris operating system, Java programming language and the open-source MySQL database — would instead receive more research and development dollars than they are getting now.

“As we head into a new chapter, will these innovations continue? We went and asked and Oracle is committed: They’re going to spend more money (on the technologies) than Sun does now,” McNealy said.

Ellison added that Oracle is committed in improving Sun’s systems by tightly integrating Oracle software into its Sparc/Solaris offerings as well as having twice as many hardware specialists to sell and service the systems.

In addition, Java, which McNealy said is currently found on 2.6 billion mobile phones and 90% of PCs, also received reassurances of continued support under Oracle’s impending stewardship.

These reassurances couldn’t have come at a better time as reports suggest that Sun has been losing customers as a result of the delay in the US$7.4bil (RM25.3bil) takeover due to a European Union antitrust investigation.

Oracle agreed to acquire Sun in April and the delay has seen Sun’s rivals such as IBM taking advantage of the uncertainty to lure away its customers. Earlier Ellison was quoted as saying that the delay was costing Sun US$100mil (RM342mil) a month.

Ellison was then in his element as he went into the offensive against IBM. He said that IBM had been running a “Sunset” campaign that told customers to move their software to IBM servers as Oracle would be divesting Sun’s hardware business after the acquisition.

“We are not selling the hardware business. No part of the hardware business are we selling,” Ellison said.

He went on to reveal that a combination of Oracle Database 11g running on Sun Sparc servers and Solaris operating system runs faster than IBM’s DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595 server.

According to the latest industry standard TPC-C benchmark, he said Oracle-Sun had achieved world record results using eight times less hardware than IBM used for its largest benchmark.

The benchmark results also showed that the Sun-Oracle server configuration ran 26% faster than IBM’s and consumed four times less energy.

The Sun-Oracle server configuration also had 16x better response time than IBM’s attempt, Ellison claimed.

Oracle is so confident in the combination of its database and Sun’s servers that it is offering to pay US$10mil (RM34.2mil) to any organisation which found that the configuration didn’t run at least twice as fast as an alternative.

“Oh, and IBM... you are welcome to enter,” Ellison said.