Oracle bought a hard-to-miss piece of the front page of the Wall Street Journal Thursday to run an ad apparently in hopes of arresting the increasing erosion in Sun’s server business.

The bulleted ad is addressed to Sun customers and says Oracle “plans to spend more money developing Sparc than Sun does now; spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now; have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing Sparc/Solaris systems than Sun does now; [and] dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.”

Then, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison tells IBM, which claims to be running off leery Sun customers, that “We’re in it to win it. IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business.”

Presumably this manifesto is Larry’s way of saying he meant what he said when Oracle’s proposed takeover of Sun was announced in April: he’s keeping Sun’s hardware business despite the ensuing speculation that he would sell the widgetry off like maybe to HP, which is also supposed to be poaching Sun accounts. And of course it reiterates his idea about using Sun for Oracle appliances.

The June quarter was horrible for all of the server makers, but it was particularly hard on Sun whose worldwide revenues were down 37.2%, according to IDC’s numbers, in part because IBM and HP have been rustling its customers. It’s a situation that could get worse since the European Commission has delayed the deal’s consummation while it investigates Oracle’s intentions with respect to the MySQL open source database, a probe that could take until January 19.

The ad says nothing about Java, which is what Oracle is supposed to be mainly interested in. And it certainly says nothing about the trouble-making MySQL.

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