Oracle Keynote at Cloud Expo

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got out ahead of his own announcement Wednesday of his plans for Sun and told both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that he intends to hire more people at Sun than he fires.

He also struck a go-it-alone pose, seeming to burn his bridges with the IBMs and HPs of the world that sell Oracle’s software on their systems. “It took us a while to decide that we would be better off with all the pieces, and not working with partners,” he told the Journal.

He’s definitely dumping Sun’s resellers. “Sun has wonderful engineering,” he told the Times, “but they didn’t seem to like selling very much. The partner model was disastrous, and we are immediately changing that.”

Instead Sun will sell direct – at least to its 4,000 top customers which account for 70% of its revenues – and sales will include two new purpose-built pre-assembled systems designed for Oracle software that are supposed to come out this year.

Oracle’s Exadata data warehouse, the appliance that now runs on Sun hardware rather than HP’s and Oracle’s singular experience with hardware so far, reportedly has a $100 million pipeline.

The papers reportedly that Oracle means to lay off less than 2,000 Sun employees, presumably in overlapping functions, and hire 2,000 more salesmen and engineers though the Times reflected that Ellison didn’t say further layoffs wouldn’t happen down the road.

Sun has around 27,000 people

Oracle continues to maintain that it can squeeze $1.5 billion in profits out of Sun the first year despite the billion in losses the company has wracked over the last decade and it’s been widely assumed that the only way it can do that is by slashing and burning its way across the Sun campus.

Ellison, however, claims making Sun profitable quickly is “very easy to fix.” If so, former Sun CEO Scott McNealy and soon-to-be-former CEO Jonathan Schwartz are sure gonna look dumb. Schwartz, by the way, is out; Ellison’s looking for a place to put Scott. Apparently they’re still talking about what the job would be.

Oracle is supposed to soft pedal Sun’s line of x86 servers and focus on its high-end Sparc machines.

The companies are apparently expecting no roadblocks from regulators in Russia and China, who have yet to sanction the $7.4 billion merger. Sun quietly delisted from the Nasdaq Tuesday according to the Journal.