1. Spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now;
2. Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now:
3. Have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris than Sun does now; and,
4. Dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.

1. How much money is Oracle talking about spending?  Spending more money than Sun is spending is "a little vague..." 
2. How many hardware specialists are we talking about (remember, Sun has been through several layoffs over the past few years --  how many hardware specialsts were left?).
3. If Oracle is talking huge investment in Sun hardware and its operating environment, how will it meet its stated accretive financial targets while making this investment?  And,
4. "Will throwing more money at SPARC hardware and software fix certain endemic problems related to Sun design and release capabilities?”

1. On spending more than Sun -- this information is proprietary so only Oracle and Sun really know how much was being spent.  But if the number was low (as we suspect it was), then spending a little more than a low figure is not very impressive.
2. On the number of hardware specialists -- again, if the number of current hardware specialists is low (as we suspect it is due to layoffs and given Sun's policy of letting its business partners handle a lot of support and professional services), then again, we're unimpressed.  
3. On the finanacial investment that Oracle needs to make -- what if Oracle needs to spend at least a billion dollars to make the Sun SPARC line competitive with other architectures.  If that's the case, how will Oracle meet its accretive financial commitment?  (From Oracle's own press release:  "We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. )  If you've got to spend a billion or more to make SPARC more competitive, there goes the Sun contribution to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit.
4. On investing more money into Sun hardware without solving habitual slipped schedules and endemic design problems -- that may be throwing good money after bad.

A Historical Perspective
Point #4 is worth dwelling on a bit more.  <:od>Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, accurately describes Sun’s progress from its inception to its take-over.  But what the Wikipedia article does not describe in much detail is why Sun was so successful up until the bubble burst ─ and why Sun has had such a hard time getting back on track afterwards. 

The following is Clabby Analytic’s view of Sun’s current predicament:

• As a Unix workstation company, Sun’s natural progression was into the low-end of the Unix server market space.  And, because it started at the low-end, Sun found itself in the perfect position when business use of the Internet took off ─ and the need for Unix-based Web (Apache) servers mushroomed.  Other vendors (HP and IBM) were building high-end Unix servers ─ big servers ─ at a time when Sun’s server product line was comprised mostly of small servers.  Sun had no real low-end competition ─ and, accordingly, made huge inroads into the server market.  This “fortunate happenstance” of product positioning enabled Sun to become the Unix server volume leader.  (Note: post 2001, Sun’s competitors had introduced their own low-end Unix servers, making it even more difficult for Sun to recover from the downturn).
• In the mid-1990s, Sun decided to expand into the high-end of the Unix market.  Using its own developmental resources, Sun internal developers had architected their own high-end enterprise servers when, in 1995, another “very fortunate happenstance” occurred.  One of Sun’s business partners, Cray Business Systems had architected a powerful, high-end Sun Unix server (that featured a high-speed switching architecture that enabled Sun servers to scale extremely efficiently).  Cray was sold-off to Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) which immediately turned around and sold this Cray Business Systems high-end UltraSPARC environment to Sun (for a paltry sum of only $50 million!).  And shortly thereafter, Sun’s internal designs were jettisoned in favor of the Cray design.  Not long after that, Sun’s very successful ES10000 was born.  (The purchase of Cray’s design can be classified as one of the best technology deals of the 1990s). 

 But this is where the beginning of the end occurred:

• Although Sun low-end, midrange, and high-end enterprise servers became highly successful, Sun was not able to parlay its initial successes into continued success.  After the bubble burst, there was no white knight in the form of Cray Business Systems that came along with a new technology that could help Sun leapfrog its competitors.  And there was no “fortunate happenstance” that put Sun in an advantageous position after the bubble burst in 2001.  In order to recover from the economic downturn of 2000 and leap frog its competitors, Sun was going to have to prove that it could develop its own game-changing architecture.  And Sun didn’t. 
• Sun’s internal attempt to design and build its next game-changing architecture that could deal with multi-cores and multiple threads (codename “Honeybee”) met with failure as the company turned to Afara Websystems for its next generation microprocessor design (these became Sun T1 and T2 servers).

Constant slippage of successive generations of UltraSPARC processors, combined with delays in the development and implementation of its new chip multi-threading (CMT)-based processors left Sun customers waiting for long, extended periods for product refreshes.  By the time Sun’s T1 and T2 architectures came along, there was huge, built-up customer demand for more scalability, computing power, and capacity ─ so quite a few T1/T2 servers were sold initially.  Meanwhile, other Sun customers, who had been burned by constant delays in product refreshes, started to look elsewhere for alternative Unix servers that could deliver the computing power and scalability that they needed on a more timely basis. 

Parting Comments
It is clear to Clabby Analytics that customer confidence in Sun is waning (big time).  Oracle will attempt to revive that confidence -- but it may be too late.

At this juncture, Clabby Analytics sees Sun SPARC archtiecture as  irrelevant.  In fact, we now see the midrange/high-end of the server market moving strongly toward three microprocessor architectures:

1) mainframe processors;
2) POWER; and
3) Intel Xeon (8-cores and beyond).  

Is throwing money at UltraSPARC and CMT technologies really going to fix Sun’s endemic microprocessor technology problems?  It hasn’t to date — so we have little confidence that increasing the spend on Sun microprocessors is really going to help Oracle extricate Sun servers from their current malaise.