Lew Tucker, who was CTO of Sun's cloud initiative and was pretty much untouched by the cloud-aborting Oracle, has been hired by Cisco as CTO of its cloud effort, a brand new job with broad pull-it-together remit that reports to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and Service Provider Group boss Tony Bates. In a previous life he led the design and implementation of salesforce.com's App Exchange arguably one of the largest cloud computing success stories so far. He thinks networks need to be more programmable. ... (more)

Oracle Surviving Sun Just Fine, Thank You

Oracle doesn't look like it's choking on Sun any. It beat the Street and its own projections Thursday when it reported its fiscal Q4 numbers. Revenue was up 39% and income was up 25%. That translates into a record 46 cents a share on $9.5 billion - 60 cents non-GAAP on expectations of 54 cents - with new software licenses up 14% to $3.1 billion. License updates and product support revenues were up 12% to $3.4 billion. Oracle estimates that Sun reduced its $3.3 billion operating income by approximately $100 million, including $176 million of amortization, and contributed about $40... (more)

IBM Demands Cloud Cover

IBM filed a breach-of-contract / misappropriation of trade secrets suit in New York Supreme Court last week seeking to hold Joanne Olsen to her non-compete and stop her from going to Oracle for a year. It's gotten a temporary restraining order according to InformationWeek. Olsen, with IBM for 31 years, was a general manager in IBM's services unit and was hired by Oracle as senior VP of on-demand services, the SaaS versions of its software, reporting to none other than Larry Ellison. IBM alleges that she knows too much about IBM, its operations, its growth strategies and its potent... (more)

Azul Zings Its Java Hardware – Poof, It’s Software

Born to peddle pricey proprietary iron built around exotic multi-core chips that ratchet up the scalability of Java apps - a dangerous exercise that has demanded a $200 million investment from its backers - Azul Systems is now going to start selling software that does pretty much the same thing as its fancy appliances but it's optimized for the latest class of cheap, ubiquitous, increasingly powerful x86 commodity servers. If the stuff clicks in the next year, eight-year-old Azul may be in a position to organize an orderly retreat from its hardware business, which, as it happens... (more)

Larry Hires David Boies to Snag a Billion Off of SAP

Oracle has hired David Boies to argue its case against SAP. Oracle has made it clear in a 2008 filing with the court that its damages "are, at a minimum, well into the several hundreds of millions of dollars and likely are at least a billion dollars." Boies is the guy who won the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Microsoft although the judge's breakup decision didn't stick. He also lost Al Gore the presidency and his boys lost SCO its case against Linux. Maybe he and his people will understand this one better. Oracle charged SAP's now defunct discount maintenance subsid... (more)