Ellison knew when he acquired Sun that the explosion of the global Internet economy, the customer-engagement economy, the real-time-and-always-on economy, the Big Data economy, or the whatever-you-want-to-call-it economy, would trigger analytical and transactional workloads for Oracle customers that would crush traditional, non-optimized hardware and software combinations.

FORBES: Why Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Is So Bullish on Sun Hardware