Sun gets its knight in shining armor after all
It appears to be a happy ending for Sun Microsystems after all. Not only did they avoid being abandoned and ravaged by the market like Yahoo, they even got a slightly higher bid with a better matching company. Oracle and Sun were always joined at the hip when it came to Java and Middleware and Oracle database and SPARC/Solaris. The vast majority of Oracle database administrator I knew consider SPARC/Solaris the only serious Oracle platform in the world (though I don’t personally agree with this viewpoint). And if cheaper/faster x86/x64 solutions are needed, Sun finally dropped their SPARC-only religion and leveraged their engineering prowess to produce some good x86/x64 servers so Oracle is now covered in terms of software and hardware.
From a technology property standpoint, the assets of both companies appear to be mostly complementary rather than competitive. That means you won’t need to kill off a lot of products to accommodate the merger which translates to fewer layoffs. That’s not to say that there won’t be redundancies and overlapping positions that won’t vanish, but I think it’s safe to say that Sun is much better off with Oracle than IBM.
I love Scott M. Fulton’s larger take on this deal.
In a 2006 interview with the Financial Times Richard Waters, Ellison was asked point-blank whether he believed the open source business model would be disruptive to Oracle’s plans. Point-blank question, point-blank answer: “No. If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it…  Once Apache got better than our own Web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it — a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do.
They are a fairly great match. Not only from the server side perspective, but also the fact that Oracle was quick to utilize Java technology in the past. The only company who utilizes Java as much as Oracle to me would be IBM.
Oracle will probably do some interesting things with Sun. My hopes are that OpenOffice.org gets an overhaul by some DB programmers and that some of the Open Source projects don’t get axed. If they are killed, I would think a fork from either Novell or IBM would be in order.
I am a bit saddened by the fact that Sun had sunk quite a bit of revenue on Open Source and were not able to benefit from this.
See Scott’s article.
It’s an interesting match. I agree that Oracle is a much better buyer than IBM; IBM basically would have been buying the engineering teams, the Java stuff, maybe roll some of the Solaris stuff into AIX, and thrown the rest away. It would have been a total asset stripping of a company with a lot of history. On the other hand, Oracle is the least imaginative, more bland and boring company on the planet. Other than their DB itself, their products are a bad cross between crappy in-house engineering and out-of-date open source code. Even their flagship DB, while it is probably the most stable, reliable, and fast DB out there, is so miserable to deal with that it is cheaper to buy another server and use MySQL or SQL Server in a cluster than it is to hire Oracle consultants. I am not a fan of Oracle in the slightest.
Of course, Sun has all of the same issues too… other than Solaris itself, none of their products really shine.
J.Ja