In recent years, Sun outsourced much of its sales, counting on resellers to promote its products. That’s anathema at Oracle, which employs 22,000 salespeople and 11,000 software consultants who work directly with its largest customers. … “Astonishingly they laid off all the sales people and they laid off all the field service people. They just got rid of them all,” he said. “Guess what? Sales dropped. It’s breathtaking!”

I am not going to mention what company this reminds me of. I will mention that the quote is from Larry Ellison. I think this article is required reading for anyone in the enterprise IT market.

“No, we’re not going to spin it off,” even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. The EU is concerned about Oracle simultaneously owning MySQL, the leading open source database, and its own Oracle enterprise commercial database.

What I found to be even more interesting is the way he is dismissing Cloud Computing. In a time where many companies are embracing the cloud, and management thereof, Ellison is focused on the basics – databases, operating systems and hardware.

“Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it’s the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud,” he said. The cloud still requires components such as databases, operating systems, and memory, said Ellison. He pointed out the seeming absurdity in which cloud computing previously was called the Internet, software as a service, and on-demand computing.

He seems to be embracing almost all aspects of the Sun acquisition, including flash storage.