April 20, 2009

Oracle acquires Sun

Oracle has aquired Sun.

There were weeks of speculation of a buyout by IBM, which generated loads of discussions on the opensolaris forums. The biggest fear was IBM buying Sun, and killing off competing products. Sun and IBM competed on many fronts.. Opensolaris vs AIX, Eclipse vs Netbeans, Mysql vs DB2, Power vs Sparc, etc.. not to mention the server hardware market.

Sun's price-tag was nothing to IBM.. it could've bought Sun out with a week's revenues. The talks fail, Oracle swoops in, and grabs Sun. A /. comment sums it up..

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

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

I wonder too.

Sun's range of technology and products dont overlap with Oracle, atleast not to the extent it did with IBM. This means that Oracle is looking to expand to have hardware solutions, and provide a complete stack (or the less probable alternative where it does not expand, and simply blew billions.)

Sun has had issues with marketing their amazing range of technologies.. Linux (and brands like RedHat/IBM/Ubuntu) are still considered the face of free software.. an arena where the majority of the code, by a large margin, has been contributed by Sun. Oracle seems to have a marketing department that seems have a clue.

My personal interest is in Opensolaris' future. Things looked bleak with IBM who would prefer AIX and/or linux, given their investment into those technologies. Oracle, on the other had, has a very good track record on Opensolaris, and an integrated Oracle/Opensolaris solution would be powerful indeed.

Oracle's presentation on this can be found here. Quoting points relevent to Opensolaris:

Slide 4

Consistent with Oracle’s strategy to provide complete, open and integrated systems
Optimize Solaris and Oracle for better performance, reliability, and manageability
Open Storage built with industry standard servers and components
Expands Oracle’s range of products, including servers and storage
..

Slide 5
Sustain Solaris as an industry standard OS for Oracle software
Continue Open Storage and Systems focus and innovation

That should quell any fears of Opensolaris going kapunk. Here's looking forward to a bright future, and continued innovation in Opensolaris land.

[Of course, bigger pundits than me have had to eat their hats on their predictions.. all of the above is pure personal speculation.. don't buy stocks based off this]