Sun co-founder hails database possibilities in Oracle deal

23.04.2009
Andreas von Bechtolsheim, a Sun Microsystems co-founder and the person who holds the distinction of being employee No. 1 at the company, expressed optimism Thursday about the planned impacts on database technologies, but he stayed silent about the deal otherwise.

Speaking at the in Santa Clara, Calif., Bechtolsheim during his presentation focused on developments in storage, particularly in the flash space. Following his talk, he shied away from responding to a question about his views on the merger, citing advice from lawyers. He also would not say whether he planned to stay at Sun after the merger. Although chairman of Arista Networks since last year, Bechtolsheim has remained a part-time Sun employee.

Bechtolsheim did cite synergies presented by the merger as far as building better database servers using such concepts as large memory. "Obviously, this is of great [an] interest to Oracle as it is to Sun," Bechtolsheim said.

"You should expect a whole bunch of interesting database servers to come out of this future collaboration," he said.

Bechtolsheim had left Sun in 1995 and returned in 2004 when Sun acquired Kealia, a server design company that Bechtolsheim had co-founded.