ENGINEERING A SOLUTION

Qualcomm

At its heart, Qualcomm—which designs and supplies a wide range of

electronics that enable mobile computing and digital products—is Location: San Diego, California

qualcomm.com

an engineering company. Consequently, Sun’s engineering-oriented Industry: Telecommunications

Employees: 12,000 solutions have played an important role in Qualcomm’s success. Oracle products: Oracle Database, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Identity

“We rely on Oracle to run our business, but we have relied even Management, Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics,

more on Sun to run our engineering applications,” says Norm

Oracle master data management products, Oracle customer relationship Fjeldheim, senior vice president and CIO at Qualcomm. “The management applications, Oracle Application Integration Architecture, Sun

engineering tools that we use to create our products run on Sun

SPARC Enterprise Servers hardware and software, and that’s an important part of our business.

RICHARD KELL

ORACLE MAGAZINE MAY/JUNE 2010

We’ve been longtime Sun customers, going back to 1992, and it’s been a great partnership over the years.”

For Fjeldheim, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun is a like a safe harbor for his technology infrastructure. “I was worried about another company picking up Sun and killing the product line,” says Fjeldheim. “So I really like what Oracle’s doing. I like Oracle’s track record of acquisitions. Being able to depend on Sun—and now Oracle—Solaris means that I can invest in these products and not worry about moving to another platform. I can count on the Sun products being supported and advanced. My investments in Sun equipment will not be lost.”

Just as important is the investment that Oracle has committed to key Sun technologies. “I’m really excited to see additional R&D investment on the Sun hardware and storage side platforms,” says Fjeldheim. “That level of R&D spending is good news for Sun customers.”

s part of the acquisition, Oracle also takes over the management of Java, an object-oriented, multithreaded, platform- independent environment for application development and deployment. Java is used in a wide variety of computing platforms—from embedded devices and mobile phones to enterprise servers—and

is the foundation for Web and networked services, applications, and platform-independent desktops. More than 2.1 billion mobile devices powered by Java are in use, as well as 2.5 billion Java cards and 800 million Java desktops.

“Java is one of the crown jewels that is coming to Oracle as part of this acquisition,” says Oracle’s Kurian. “Java is, by far, the most popular programming language in enterprises, with close to 10

“I like Oracle’s track record of acquisitions,” says Norm Fjeldheim, senior vice president

million developers in the world building applications with it. We’ll and CIO at Qualcomm. “Being able to depend on Sun—and now Oracle—Solaris means that

I can invest in these products and not worry about moving to another platform.”

enhance and extend the reach of the Java programming model to support the emerging application development paradigm.”

applications. Now organizations will be able to leverage the core In addition, Oracle plans to integrate and simplify the runtime

strengths of both companies through a new, integrated enterprise platform for Java while optimizing it for both existing and emerging

software and hardware stack that both reduces complexity and deployment architectures. Oracle also plans to invest in and revitalize

increases agility.

the Java developer community both by offering best-of-breed “By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be able to provide an integrated Java technology and by making the Java community process more

hardware and software solution, in which all the components of participatory to people from a variety of different organizations.

the technology stack are optimized to work well together,” says Sun has long been known for industry-leading, standards-based

Qualcomm’s Fjeldheim. “This optimization will enable Oracle computer systems, software, and storage. And Oracle has been

solutions to perform faster and more reliably. Oracle and Sun will be well-known for its high-performance databases, middleware, and

able to do that better together than separately.” W

OPEN STORAGE

David A. Kelly (dkelly@upsideresearch.com) is a business, technology,

Oracle’s Sun open storage combines advanced software with industry-

and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.

standard hardware, enabling companies to save on storage costs. Sun open storage systems will enable companies to expand their infra-

NEXT STEPS

structure without sacrificing initial investments. Other benefits include • The combination of Sun open storage with Sun FlashFire,

creating world-record performance for storage infrastructure

ENGINEERING A SOLUTION