The Hindu : Sun-Oracle offer low cost network computing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jun 26, 2003

Business

Business

Sun-Oracle offer low cost network computing

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE JUNE 25. Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation, have joined hands — and products — to offer low cost networking solutions in India. In a combined announcement today, the global leaders in networked computers and enterprise software respectively, offered a seamless fusion of Sun's platform hardware and operating environments (the Solaris flavour of Unix or its `open' version, Linux) with Oracle's "collaboration suite'' of applications. The `front end' would be provided by Sun's "StarOffice'' suite of business tools.

While the twosome has always projected a `made for each other' image here while targeting the high-end banking, financial and telecom markets with its combined hardware-software offerings, the new joint strategy is aimed at the `small guys' of the business world. Bhaskar Pramanik, Managing Director of Sun Microsystems India suggested that typically $10,000 could buy a combined solution for starters. Indeed the partners have redefined the meaning of the acronym TCO to make their `affordable computing' pitch: it's not "Total Cost of Ownership'' anymore, but all about "Taking Cost Out.'' To achieve compellingly priced solutions, Oracle India's Managing Director Shekhar Dasgupta today announced that its software would now run on all three Sun platforms: Solaris on Sparc-based systems; Solaris on x86 machines and Linux on x86 platforms. In fact, to stress the 'Siamese twin' nature of the partnership the two players said customers could sign up to become "VIPs'' — upon which any one of them would field service problems generated by the other's part of the total solution.

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