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Oracle Buys Sun
bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Sun = Poorly run company with great products
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I wonder how that DNA is going to come together...
There was a time when Oracle was considering Netbeans, but Oracle joined the Eclipse Foundation.
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
Might be interesting to see what happens. I think Netbeans will live on. Too many of sun's products rely on it.
What I'm more concerned with is the amount of contributions to PostgreSQL.
I still feel had they put more money/time into postgresql instead of buying MySQL, they wouldn't need to be bought.
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Eclipse is open-source.
So is Netbeans.
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I wonder how long it will take Oracle to pretty much give the middle finger to HP and Dell hardware partnerships in favor of the soon-to-be-released OracleFire "product-in-the-box" line...
I'd expect to see closer integration with their DB. ZFS has some very nice transactional facilities. Oracle on other platforms tends to use its own filesystem drivers, but on Solaris they could use a ZVOL for the underlying transactional model easily and benefit from the lower-level parts of ZFS while using their own code for the data layout. They already ship a Linux distribution for running the DB, but I wouldn't be surprised if they start shipping Solaris instead (they can then tie their code closely to the kernel without having to open source it).
The most interesting question is what will happen to the UltraSPARC line. On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world. While Sun hardware is relatively expensive, even a top spec T2 box is cheap compared to the software cost of a typical Oracle install and so I wouldn't be surprised if the T3 is tweaked even more heavily for Oracle workloads. Being able to sell a complete vertical solution, with their own CPU, OS, and DB system is probably quite appealing to Oracle.
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Actually. I think it might well go the other way. That Oracle decided to fork/clone Red Hat shows one thing - Oracle WANTS to have an OS.
Now they have one.
Why? From what I've seen, the recent UltraSPARCs (T2, and possibly the Rock too) have the best performance-per-watt when running parallel workloads with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Oracle workloads are parallel, with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Shipping Oracle appliances on T2 chips means that they aren't having to pay another company a share of their profits for their CPU, and continuing to sell them to other people helps them offset more of the R&D costs.
Oh, and Sun aren't the only company making SPARC chips. Some of the ones Sun has been selling for the past few years have been rebranded Fujitsu SPARC64s and there are a few companies selling SPARC32 (v8) systems for the embedded market, although they are less common than ARM and PowerPC.
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"Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing""
... This product lock in is part of their thinking and so part of their product lifespan planning process. Now that kind of thinking will be applied to everything Sun has given them.
I think this is one of the biggest potential down sides of this deal. Oracle seek to control their products through using "their own thing"
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
8.4 has citext. Or you can make an index with lower() on the appropriate columns.
IMO it's preferable for software to not assume that "Helped my uncle Jack off a horse." and "Helped my uncle jack off a horse." are the same thing.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle.
I'd think MySQL is one of the reasons Oracle bought Sun. Whatever its failings, MySQL is the "default" choice for most new (small) deployments (I mean, to the extent there's the LAMP acronym for it), the ones that are too small for Oracle to care about.
Now that Oracle has it, they're in a position to "upsell" them once they get far enough. They now control both the high end AND the low end ("... the horizontal and the vertical..."). I'd expect an upper limit to the effort put into scaling MySQL up ("we already have a high-end DB, why waste the effort?"), but I don't see them abandoning it.
Netbeans is much faster and elegant than JDev. Netbeans is much like another Eclipse, maybe better...
In the long run, FOSS converges to one winner, challenged by many (much smaller) creatures. Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets. Try to compete with Apache. Try to build a new OpenOffice (though one that had a major corp backing). I expect these IDE's to converge in one way or other to a single winner, and some small hang-on-tight communities fervor's for their champ remaining intact.
As for MySQL, the Oracle benefactors will say: do not worry, my dear people, we will keep it with true love, and gradually let it become deprecatingly obsolete.
Oracle suddenly has a great operating system, great server hardware, a popular database, and the de facto language of server-side business logic (other than COBOL.)
And IBM has built so much of its business on Java.
IBM should have just opened the piggy bank and it would have saved itself the world of hurt it now has in store.
This was an intellectual property firesale. IBM = idiots. Congratulations to anyone who realized Sun stock was ridiculously undervalued; you deserve the profit you made by buying low.
Nonesense.
Their SPARC servers are their highest margin servers and account for most of their revenue. UltraSPARC server sales declined but the CoolThreads servers and x86 servers increased, but nowhere near the level of their traditional SPARC based revenues.
Buying Sun, and killing SPARC would be a stupid idea. They could have bought other companies cheaper.
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I think this is exactly right. Now every time IT installs a MySQL database, the CEO will see 'Oracle'. They will have warm fuzzy feelings because they know Oracle is serious software(TM). They will also see that Oracle doesn't have to be expensive. They will then have the same sort of up sell opportunity that Microsoft had with Access to SQL Server, except of course that MySQL is not as f***ed up as Access. For MS, the upsell occurred as soon as you moved from personal to departmental. With Oracle, the line of division will be (roughly) division and enterprise.
Think global, act loco
I'm hoping that's a joke and not serious...
Why would that be a joke? For years Oracle/Solaris/SPARC was one of the preferred stacks for deploying a mission critical OLTP system in the enterprise as well as many start-ups.
When Oracle embraced linux and created their linux distro, they called it "unbreakable linux", because they made enhancements to linux to make it more stable. Implying that it was breakable before.
You don't have "Unbreakable Solaris" because that would be like having a banana-flavored banana.
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Oracle vs DB2, I think most people will choose Oracle unless they're a long time IBM mainframe shop and think their IBM salespeople walk on water.
Same goes for AIX vs Solaris.
This is probably why IBM was even considering buying Sun, to keep Oracle from buying it.
Now you have a great database, OS, server hardware, application servers, middleware, development tools, consulting services, all from a single vendor. It's another IBM, but with products that people prefer.
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I was going to ask about KDE or Gnome.
MySQL or Postgres is still going strong.
Perl or Python ended up being both + Ruby
Windowmaker of FVWM ended up with neither
Firebird can't compete with MySQL. PostgreSQL can. The risk for Oracle just might be that PostgreSQL can compete with Oracle. MySQL can be a good backend, but it can't meet some of the advanced needs that people have of Oracle. Therefore it's not really a competitor. It hoovers up all the small players that either don't care for or can't afford Oracle's almighty solutions. Even the table type that does lend MySQL some of the more advanced technology (InnoDB) is licenced from Oracle and their home-grown version (Falcon) has yet to show signs of being usable.
PostgreSQL can't provide all the features and power that Oracle can either. For the absolute most powerful setup you can ask, you want Oracle. But PostgreSQL can get a lot closer than MySQL. And migrating between PostgreSQL and Oracle is also quite easy a lot of the time. I think from Oracle's point of view, they'd rather MySQL be out there as the go-to database than PostgreSQL. This is all a bit conspiracy theory - I make no suggestion that Oracle actually are looking at things from this point of view and I don't think it would be a factor in purchasing SUN even if they did consider this angle. But I'm just considering the actual implications and it seems to me that while MySQL doesn't compete in the same market as Oracle and wouldn't for quite some time, its main rival PostgreSQL can and sometimes does.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.