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

What about MySQL?

[kaffiene]

Well well well. I can see this working well for Oracle - they use Java a great deal... and it should be good news for Sun's open source projects like Netbeans - which would, I think, be maintained under Oracle.

I guess it's a little sad to see Sun unable to continue by themselves, but the writing was on the wall and I think Oracle will keep all the Sun products working, but of course the big question is what does this mean for MySQL?

Re:What about MySQL?

[ByOhTek]

Oracle already has Linux (a re-branded RHEL) for it's *NIX platform.

My guess is they'll relegate either their Linux, or Solaris to the back (either way, I wouldn't be surprised if Solaris went completely open source, no non-open-source Solaris).

Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing", my guess is they'll move to Solaris, and their Linux distro will take a bow, since it's based off of someone elses work, that they've not yet acquired.

Re:What about MySQL?

[Alain Williams]

Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.

I don't know what that is, though...

Remember: Larry hates Bill. Bill earns a lot of $$ from MS Office. This may result in more funding for OoO.

Re:What about MySQL?

[BlackCreek]

I have many co-workers that use Eclipse everyday, but that never got hold of point of the joke in the name.

"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted by something else. It makes IBM's reasons for funding Eclipse dead obvious. Turn one of your competitor's product niche into a commodity.

Re:What about MySQL?

[Jon Peterson]

"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."

I do have the hardware and software to hand :-). We moved to T2 architecture (T5240s) at the beginning of the year for Oracle and for a bunch of other apps. In the case of Oracle it does what you expect - scales massively well for large numbers of fast queries (i.e. typical webapp situation), but of course if you have a single huge query, it's going to run on a single execution thread, slowly. A simple performance test showed Oracle scaling linearly until our test *client* ran out of steam - by then we were far about any expected load so didn't test further.

The key thing is licensing. We run Oracle 10g standard, and it works out very well. Oracle have insane licensing with fine distinctions about when a core counts as a CPU blah blah blah. Right now, with T2 we get 64 parallel execution threads for 1 Oracle CPU license, which works for me :-)

I'll be interested to see what Rock offers, but with the virtualization capabilities in Solaris, the T2 gives us a lot of room to be flexible and split stuff up. If you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and have designed your software on the principles of atomicity, asynchronicity, and statelessness, it does let you scale very very nicely.

Re:What about MySQL?

[McKing]

I concur with this assessment. We recently moved from a $300,000 SunFire 6900 (a system the size of a standard full-size 42U rack) with 12 dual core CPU's and 48 GB of RAM that drew massive amounts of power and cooling, to a $30,000 T2 blade with 64GB of RAM that runs cool and sips power. Our DBA's were amazed at the improvement. We need to upgrade the front end systems now to keep up with the increase in performance of the backend! We were able to trade in the 6900, and the savings on *support* for the 6900 offset the purchase price of 2 blade chassis, 10 blades and a SAN!

For our workload, the massive parallel architecture of the T2 really suits Oracle. For any type of multithreaded or multiprocessed throughput-based app (web serving, front-end app servers, LDAP server, database server), the T1 and T2 design is perfect.

Re:What about MySQL?

[segedunum]

...but of course if you have a single huge query, it's going to run on a single execution thread, slowly.

You've described > 90% of the workload use cases that > 90% of organisations have and why businesses have been moving from SPARC to x86 for a vast number of jobs where they simply want to process single jobs faster, or increasingly large single jobs. As a result, you've also described why Niagara won't save SPARC.

Re:What about MySQL?

[Forge]

No he is correct.

They are under no obligation to accept any contributions. What they cannot do is prevent other people from distributing their own modified versions.

Just as Linus rejected my Kernel mod claiming "this piece of $#!7 doesn't even compile and from my reading of the changes if it did the machine wouldn't boot."

So the grand parent is entirely correct. If you don't like the official version go fork it yourself.

Re:What about MySQL?

[metamatic]

Bertrand Model predicts that a duopoly pushes costs and profits down to marginal levels and is the ultimate result of any sufficiently competitive marketplace.

Disclaimer: I'm not an economist.

Wow

[rackserverdeals]

This is a big surprise.

Wonder if Solaris will become their main development platform again.

Well, crap.

[JerkBoB]

Is 8am too early to start drinking?

I am deeply disappointed by this turn of events.

IBM would have been a much better buyer, if the deal had to be done.

Oracle? Bleah!

Well, I'll bet the suits at IBM are kicking themselves hard, now that Oracle has control of Java.

I'm quite sure that IBM hates itself now

[egghat]

Oracle+Sun has the power to seriously harm IBM. IBMs big plus was the combination of good hardware + OS + DB + consultants.

Oracle + Sun can now deliver exactly the same.

bye egghat

Oracle was wanting its own OS

[hal2814]

Oracle was wanting its own OS. Not the worst way to get one and not the worst OS to have.

Facinating combination

[downix]

What we have here on one hand is Oracle, a company that is incredibly well run, but with products that don't cover a complete spectrum, and Sun, a so-so run company with a wide range of product lines. This can go two ways, Suns platform quality goes down while Oracles management goes down with it, *or*, and this is the scenario I hope for, Oracle cleans out the dead wood in Sun management, and adopts the Sun technology in force. I've worked on Oracle machines, and Sun machines. I've also delt with both companies sales forces. If the synergy can be hammered out, this can really shake up the business world.

One suggestion tho, keep both names. Use Sun for the hardware, Oracle for the software.

I doubt it

[shis-ka-bob]

MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle. When is the last time you saw Oracle used as the back end for a Wiki or a large company use MySQL for an enterprise ERP system? It may happen that somebody uses a product outside of its niche, but like a lungfish on land, it just isn't as effective as something that has evolved to better fill that role.

Good-bye MySQL

[PhotoGuy]

Thankfully, I have recently switched myself (and my clients) over to Postgresql.

It was a sad day when Oracle got the rights to the InnoDB engine, but at least MySQL itself was in the hands of Sun.

With Oracle now owning all the rights to what is probably the biggest free competitor, I think the open source world shouldn't put much stock or investment into MySQL.

I've been quite impressed with the performance and straight-forwardness of PostGres, and will continue to happily use it. I was alawys keeping MySQL in the back of my mind, to try out now and then, but with this announcement, I doubt it'll be worthwhile.

Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?

Aside from that, I find this all very sad. Sun was one of the Unix innvators from the earliest days. Even when they grow large, they still seemed like a "cool company." Healey used to personally answer emails I would send him. Oracle seems to be the antithesis of this; major, corporate, gouging, monster... One can only hope that some of Sun's culture and products will survive.

Niagara should have a future

[shis-ka-bob]

We are entering an era where energy conservation is going to be critical. Niagara2 can provide 32 threads for 72 Watts. This is a great CPU for a hypothetical Oracle on-site enterprise database appliance. Add a hot-failover-to-cloud, and you can have a database that doesn't even stop for upgrades or floods.

Sparc into legacy mode?

[jotaeleemeese]

Didn't get that impression last time I attended one of their seminars a few weeks ago.

The multicore stuff Sun is doing is miles ahead og anything anybody else is doing,. I hope Oracle do not axe that.

Re:Java 8 Preview

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Seriously, anyone who has taken a close look at what Oracle has done to Java with JDeveloper and Oracle AS knows that this will not be good for Java. Oracle is famous for not implementing standard API calls and instead providing proprietary methods and super classes to implement basic functionality (JDBC BLOBs, web services, etc.) Vendor lock-in is one thing, but their ideas and designs are just ugly and unwieldy.

They had started to play nice with EJB3 and TopLink, but now they have absolutely no reason to keep doing so. They now have much more weight in the JCP process (if the JCP even continues to exist) and they can now push out better ideas from competitors. I'm very apprehensive about the future of Java.

Good move...for Oracle

[ErichTheRed]

I remember seeing Oracle rebranding high-end server hardware recently, and tweaking Oracle to run ultra-fast on that particular configuration. Now they have a hardware platform (Sun's x86 and Sparc lines), a software infrastructure (Java) and a marketing lock (Sun hardware and Oracle database purchases seem to go hand in hand, even now.)

So it's a good move for them. We'll see how well it works out for everyone else. Oracle hasn't been known for developing products that don't require an army of Oracle consultants to get working. If they use the Sun acquisition to build their "database in a box" product, then customers face lock-in on the hardware and software fronts, just like back in the mainframe/midrange days.

It might be the cynic in me talking, but Oracle has been one of the major causes of large-scale IT failures you read about in the industry press. It's helped along by bad requirements and idiotic lowest-bidder consulting firms, but Oracle is sometimes forced to pay large settlements for running a project over budget. That's just a natural side effect of designing products that are so complex that you have no choice but to buy support. Also, you have to wonder what Oracle's going to do with MySQL now...

Oracle consumed J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and BEA. Let's see how well they digest this one!

The day MySQL died

[MBCook]

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How queries could run for a while.
Adding more memory would help
But performance would still make us yelp,
Still the price was cheap and always made us smile.

But April's news made us shiver
Oracle would our DB deliver
DBAs on the doorstep;
Large checks we'll have to schlep.

I know that our CEO cried,
When the new price he spied.
Our low cost hope now are fried.
The day MySQL died.

(continue on your own)

Re:Wow. Just Wow.

[TheRaven64]

A Sun/Apple merger would have made sense ten years ago, when Apple had a great desktop UNIX but with an ageing kernel and running on CPUs from a company that couldn't meet their demands. Sun had a decent server UNIX, with a nice kernel, but no real presence on the (corporate) desktop. OS X on a Solaris kernel, on SPARC would have been very nice, and could have scaled right down to the SPARC v8 systems designed for handheld systems up to the v9 cores designed for massive SMP servers. Steve Jobs still hasn't forgiven Sun for abandoning OpenStep though, so it was never very likely.

The real shame is that, in the mid '90s, Sun put together an incredible hardware and software stack for mobile devices. A few bits of it made it into Java, but most of it never went to market. If Sun had licensed the software and sold the hardware to ODMs then they would almost certainly not have been looking for a buyer now.

This doesn't sound like a good move.

[jcr]

I think Oracle's underestimated the cost of integration between companies with such dissimilar cultures. Not to mention, by jumping into the hardware business, they've given all of the other hardware makers a very strong reason to steer their customers away from Oracle.

-jcr

Re:The internal announcement

[mzs]

The rumors are that the IBM deal fell through when IBM balked at the size of the golden parachutes that Sun expected. My guess of what happened is that Oracle was scared of IBM+Sun as their competitor. So they bought Sun so IBM wold not. Oracle does not really believe all of the stuff they stated (about financials) and others are inferring (like they were interested in MySQL, Java, sparc, etc). They simply saw that if they offered a better deal to the Sun execs they could prevent the creation of the most serious competitor they had ever faced. The Sun execs cared more for themselves than the long term good of Sun's products and employees.