Tech Talk by a Kiwi
| This entry was posted by Steve on 30 January, 2010 at 4:15 pm, and is filed under Commentary. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Tech Talk by a Kiwi
| This entry was posted by Steve on 30 January, 2010 at 4:15 pm, and is filed under Commentary. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
Oracle completes acquisition of Sun Microsystems
In what can only be described as a sad day for tech geeks like myself, Oracle announced on Wednesday that they have completed their acquisition of Sun Microsystems after getting the go ahead from the EU a week earlier.
All Sun Micro websites have already been redirected to the Oracle domain, including the product sites that were formally on the sun.com domain.
I still have major concerns about how Oracle will treat the various product lines outside of Java. Java was the primary reason Oracle went down this path in the first place. After the tantrum Oracle threw when Red Hat managed to acquire JBOSS it was almost inevitable. Oracle wants to control the whole stack you use in your enterprise. With the purchase of Sun Microsystems, they now have the ability to offer their customers a complete product stack to compete with IBM and Hewlett Packard directly. Especially IBM.
Make no mistake folks, IBM is definitely the target in this particular game. Oracle wants to dominate the Enterprise market in every way. Its not enough that their software products sit on top of computers made by IBM, they want to be able to completely supplant IBMs entire range. Hardware, OS, back end, middleware and the front end. They are now in the perfect position to attempt to do that.
With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle gets Java, Solaris, Open Office.org, mainframe systems, mini/midi servers, commodity based PC servers, storage systems. They’re no longer just an ERP/database company. They can offer Enterprise customers almost everything IBM does now in a completely unified package. I am certain that will be the direction they take.
Unfortunately for Oracle, they have to stop the bleeding of customers that are jumping ship from Sun to IBM right now primarily because of Oracle. Oracle’s track record has not exactly been a good one. BEA customers suddenly found the cost of their systems going up significantly when Oracle bought BEA. As have the customers of many other companies that Oracle has purchased over the years.
Will things change in the short term? Probably not for quite some time. But rest assured that Oracle definitely has IBM in their sights. Problem with this kind of strategy is that you often miss what is happening in the peripheral and could easily get blind sided.
Here’s the Oracle press release.