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."

Comments

Wow

[EmagGeek]

Sun = Poorly run company with great products
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products

I wonder how that DNA is going to come together...

Re:Wow. Just Wow.

[eldavojohn]

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.

Application server? Java development environment? Control of the Java language? UI Technology? Hardware?

Everyone seems to be missing the big picture: Oracle's goal is to offer you a fully supported "stack" from database to application server to hardware and everything in between. All the development tools, technologies, languages, etc. So they can lock you in and offer you the full range of support, no handing you off to so and so because it's not a database problem anymore. Would you pay a premium for that? That's how you make money. And now, they have filled a lot of those gaps and have absorbed some great teams to make that dream a reality. Or so they believe. We'll see how this turns out.

Re:What about MySQL?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Wow

[wlt]

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.

Re:What about MySQL?

[MindKata]

"Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing""

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" ... 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.

Re:Postgres is looking better than ever

[rho]

Their string comparisons are case sensitive.

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.

Re:I doubt it

[wlt]

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.

That 7.4 billion bought a sh*tload of useful I.P.

[cpu_fusion]

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.

I agree

[shis-ka-bob]

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.