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What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?

Posted by timothy on from the ask-the-oracle dept.

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writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer.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."

5 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. What direction will Oracle take Java? by goltzc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
  2. Am I the only one? by More_Cowbell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
    1. Re:Am I the only one? by blind+biker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      NO, absolutely not the only one - that's my hope as well. But the truth is, Sun is a company that gave a lot to the world in which it exists, and monetized very little of it. It's the greatest open source contributor (Solaris, Java, OpenOffice, the SPARC architecture itself, NetBeans, ZFS... and I'm sure missing some, as Sun gave away HUGE amounts of stuff).

      Such companies don't usually succeed in a commercial sense. I'm tempted to say that Sun should cease to be a for-profit publicly traded company, and become either a state-sponsored institution, or private foundation, for the development of high-tech.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  3. A Strategic Solution by Hangtime · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Makes sense by rackserverdeals · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Dual Opteron < $600