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What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."
I think the two companies have some excellent synergies*. My biggest concern with Oracle purchasing Sun (as opposed to the other way around) is that there would be a culture clash. Sun is a very dynamic environment that fosters great new ideas. But unless those core competencies bubble up through Oracle, the Sun portion of the company would be strangled to death.
Personally, I've always wanted to see Sun purchase Oracle. But I don't think that's happening at this point.
* Warning: Corporate buzzword!
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I work at an Oracle shop. Most of my job is writing web apps that obfuscate base Oracle (applications) craziness. On the rare occasion I've had to actually dig into Oracle's Java code I have found my self trying to figure what kind of strange world they are living in. Most of their code seems to not only defy best practices but any semblance of good design.
Maybe its just that the code I've seen has been outsourced stuff that came back in as unclean globs of code but it makes me a little leery to see where Oracle would take Java.
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Am I the only one that hopes Sun changes it's mind about selling itself and succeeds on its own? I know they have made some big strategic errors that have gotten them where they are now, but it is a solid company (imho) with, from what I've seen, superior products. Grossly undervalued for some time now.
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No it isn't. That's Postgres.
And with the current state of mysql, I wouldn't look at buying Sun for that reason at all. The other assets make far more sense.
Plus, Sun and Oracle have both been major open source supporters, Oracle probably one of the single largest kernel contributor. That would be a good pairing.
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A lot of SAP stuff uses Java. You bet SAP will do everything they can to prevent Oracle buying Sun.
It would be quite ironic ... MySQL has had to deal with Oracle acquiring InnoDB and then Sleepycat (Berkeley DB) ... multiple times they had to rework MySQL's underpinnings because they didn't want Oracle to own key parts of the platform. If Oracle were to be in control of MySQL they'd be able to "un-deprecate" (reprecate?) those engines.
I'd like to see that, actually -- Berkeley DB is an amazingly robust data store. It worked well with MySQL.
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I am so not comfortable with Oracle being in charge of one of the remaining UNIX vendors... Better to see another UNIX license holder get them than that.
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If they could both bury the hatchet for about 5 minutes, a joint bid by Oracle and IBM would actually make much more sense. IBM would take the Solaris platform and hardware, Oracle would take the ZFS, MySQL, and DTrace. They could then both jointly purchase and spin-off Java into an Open Source project or its own firm with each company taking a stake. Since both rely so heavily on Java and neither would enjoy the other firm owning the platform it makes perfect sense for it to continue as an independent entity.
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I agree. PostgreSQL is much closer to Oracle than MySQL is. Anyone that thinks MySQL is the best replacement for Oracle likely doesn't know much about Oracle.
It seems that sun has done a bit with PostgreSQL as well. Too bad they bought MySQL. They should have instead invested in making PostgreSQL better, at least developing better replication and clustering. That way, PostgreSQL would have been an even stronger alternative to Oracle.
Oracle used to have Solaris/SPARC as their main development platform, then they switched to Linux. That seems to have been a big blow to Sun. While Oracle still releases Oracle for Solaris/Sparc along with Linux, but the Solaris/x86 versions are always slow. I don't 11g has been released for Solaris/x86 yet.
If I was Jonathan Schwartz, I would have rather put the $1bln they spent on MySQL on PostgreSQL. I don't think it would have even really taken that much either. I'm still just baffled over spending $1bln on a company that I think made $50mln in it's best year!?!?!
Anyway... Oracle developers might not have been too happy about moving away from Solaris because they'd lose DTrace.
I thought I heard something about there being some bad blood between Ellison and Sun but I don't know what that was about.
I still think Cisco should be more interested.
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Really, Microsoft are obviously the best fit to buy them.
Just like in the days of Windows 3.1, Microsoft need an new OS to replace the old mess they currently have. Back then they nicked NT from IBM. Now they can have Solaris.
They're obviously admirers of Java, given how they've effectively created Java++ (C#). So that's an nice fit. They'd also be buying their way into every single educational institution in the world.
Finally they're well placed to use MySQL as the basis for the next version of Access, giving them a nice up sell to SQL Server.
Sun shining through the Windows. You heard it here first, folks.
I have long thought that IBM or Oracle would buy Sun to control Java. Yes there are innovations that come out of Sun, but hold long can Sparc compete with Intel/AMD and Solaris compete with Linux. Sun just doesn't have the resources to win both of those battles. Java is their trump card, and they don't know how to monetize it. Unless they figure out how to profit off of Java, I see them dieing a slow death.
Think Deeply.
Let me tell you a story. I work in a professional environment in a 10k+ Person Organization. We decided we want to implement Identity Management. We chose the (Open Source) Sun Identity Manager, one of their enterprise products, based on J2EE.
The documentation is horrible, but that's not what it's about. Our development machines run on a JBoss AS with a Mysql Repository. The performance is horrible, and I mean it. It's beyond bad, MySql gobbles up the whole server. It takes 95% CPU time and 2 gb ram for our (rather complex) queries.
On our staging machine (running Oracle as a repository), the same tasks take 10% CPU and we hardly notice it happening.
Needles to say, SUN thought it might be a good idea (for political reason obv) to include Mysql in their documentation as "supported", although no sane person would actually use it.
I kinda forgot what my post has to do with this story. I just read "Oracle + Sun" and it clicked. I'm conditioned to think it's a perfect combination.
Neil McAlister is a tool. Although he found a few supportive quotes to his point, he doesn't know anything about Oracle's view on software, much less what they think of Sun's "our products are so good, they're free" attitude. I think Sun has made several mistakes in the last 10 years, and Safra Catz and Charles Phillips don't particularly want to clean up the mess. Where's Neil's quotes from Oracle? Did anyone notice those were completely absent from his article? This is just foolish speculation, not based upon any analysis of Oracle itself.
Having worked with Cisco, I don't think they want Sun, either. For the same sorts of reasons, it isn't a good fit for them. Sun is a loser bet, really. Cisco doesn't suddenly want to go from "a little software in support of their hardware" to something insanely complex like Sun. It just isn't a company that can lead it. IBM was a good fit because they can do hardware and software and operating systems pretty dang well. So, who does that leave? Anyone? Yes. SGI comes to mind for me, too. Can they? Probably not. Would they? Still not so sure. They did both try the "put our Unix on an Intel" idea and failed, so at least they screw up the same way. I sense some compatibility there.
Oracle's money is better spent on making their current acquisitions stronger products than in acquiring a messy company. They aren't after the Sun staff. The good ones have all be competitively hired by the likes of IBM and Oracle already. I sure wish someone on Slashdot who has a friend who is a CEO would pass on the importance of not losing "intellectual capital." You can blame the economy or the 'tards in Washington, DC all you want, but when you get right down to it, a company is people. You lose the right people, you lose the magic, and the company will fail soon after. I think, therefore, that because Sun has lost their magic, and their minds for rejecting IBM's bid, They will continue in a smaller, weaker way, or soon be sliced into divided sales.
Solaris was only "released" after Linux had repeatedly shown Sun that being proprietary was a bad idea. And even now OpenSolaris != Solaris, plus you won't need both hands to count the number of external contributors.
SPARC, that's nice ... you know many OpenSource developers who have chip fabrication plants?
Java ... yeh, after IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, GNU, etc. spent 10 years reimplementing most of it. And Mono had mostly implemented C# 1.0. So they were basically forced to open it, or become as irrelivant as they are in the OS world.
OpenOffice ... yeh, well done. They had a flash of insight (for once) that they couldn't possibly compete with it without open sourcing it.
Netbeans ... again was proprietary, got shot in the face by eclipse, was reluctantly released (hmm, sounds familiar).
OpenDS - yeh, I know a lot of people using this instead of OpenLDAP or Fedora/RH directory server.
NFS - They made a single code drop at the begining, to make it a std., so they could sell "the good implementation" which was only in Solaris (and never released until decades later).
ZFS - Same deal, they've released it as narrowly as possible to try and make it a std. ... and it looks like BTRFS is going to shoot them in the face, just like something did every other time.
So, sure, by lines of code dumped onto the 'net Sun are an open source company. In pretty much any other way of evaluating it though, they suck.
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