Swallowing The Sun
Of course by now you have heard that Oracle has acquire Sun.
Financial benefits aside, here are some positives about the deal:
- Lots of potential for the Oracle owned and controlled hardware division. Oracle application pre-packaged servers anyone? Could be a great way to differentiate hardware offerings and provide complete solutions at attractive prices.
- And possibly even more important than hardware, Solaris Sun’s best of bread UNIX OS. One of the reasons Apple has been so successful of late is a result of them controlling the hardware and OS software for their products. Could Oracle create better products with greater control over the Hardware, OS, and Applications?
- Will also be interesting to see how Oracle assimilates Suns’ cloud computing initiatives. Certainly seems to make sense that Oracle feels the need to play in the cloud computing space.
Bottom line, there are very few IT companies that can do what Oracle can now do (hardware to application and everything in between). I can only think of one other company – IBM.
But I also have some concerns:
- I don’t think it’s a good thing that Oracle now owns an increasing number of open source products, specifically MySQL. No matter what the executives say about ongoing support and investment, it’s hard to serve two masters (free DB versus not free DB).
- I wonder how it will affect the entire Sun sponsored Java universe? Oracle is not of course Java-hostile. But will Oracle allow the Java initiatives to stay focused, open, and flourishing? My prediction, Google will sprint ahead as the mover and shaker in the Java world and will become even more influential in web development around all things Java, browser, and web.
- I will miss the days when Gates and McNealy used to directly spar head to head
I welcome your comments,
Mike Brannan
