Mark Hurd, Oracle president.
Oracle president Mark Hurd says there are no plans for Oracle or indeed its acquired Sun Microsystems hardware business to launch an iPad competitor, CBR can reveal.
It was the late Nineties when Oracle chief Larry Ellison joined Sun Microsystems’ then-CEO Scott McNealy to evangelise the idea of thin clients with functionality to rival PCs. It was a message that sat well with Sun’s "the network is the computer" mantra, coined by Sun’s 21st employee John Burdette Gage.
Sun did launch Sun Ray thin clients back then – Oracle still sells them today – but they failed to live up to the hype and displace the traditional PC desktop in many organisations.
Yet given the pedigree, one might think that Sun would have been working on a tablet, thanks to its experience in thin clients and the fact that Apple is selling about 15 million iPads per quarter. But not according to Mark Hurd.
"Everything we do is iPhone and iPad ready," Oracle’s Hurd told CBR. "We don’t put as much importance on the device – we think it’s more important that our customers have software that’s ready for that world."
"We’re getting our backbone infrastructure mobile ready and secure – that’s where we are spending our time," Hurd said.
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