Russ Pearlman's Blog

Amazingly with IBM dropping out of the bidding, Oracle was able to acquire Sun Microsystems today. I’m sure that more and more will be made of this in the coming days / weeks, but I wanted to provide some of my own thoughts:

• First, what this means for the database market. Oracle is the market leader in the Enterprise database space with it’s Oracle RDBMS. Of course, there is competition from IBM (DB2) and Microsoft (SQL Server). But, now that Oracle will get MySQL as part of the Sun prize, there is a rather interesting puzzle about what they will do with it. Perhaps we will find Oracle “light” or perhaps they will provide an update / migration path. Or, perhaps they can add some of the clustering support to it that would lead to a very serious blow to SQL Server. In my opinion, this is most likely bad news for Microsoft while I suspect DB2 will be uneffected.
• Second, Java. From its acquisiton of BEA, Oracle has built a rather impressive J2EE stack from portal to SOA middleware to services registry to RDBMS. By adding in Sun, they gain that much more credibility. This one is a direct blow against IBM since it really steps up their presence as a true comprehensive solution for anyone serious about J2EE. (IBM, of course, will continue to dominate J2EE for mainframe shops – but that is a shrinking market).
• Third, the open-source marketplace. Oracle is lagging behind IBM significantly in the open-source space. And, Sun had made a recent push to head that way themselves. Not only does Oracle now pick up MySQL, but it also picks up Glassfish, OpenESB and other projects owned by sun. I think this is going to potentially be a huge boon for Oracle, especially in the services area.

Overall, I think this is a great move by Oracle. It helps to marginalize some of Microsoft, it allows them to better compete with IBM and it brings them into the modern open-source space.

Again, how that all works its way out is still unknown…