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Oracle to buy Sun for 7.5 billion
- Thread starter Full of Win
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Sun is the 3rd biggest player in the server market with 15% of the market share, if that isnt dominance then i dont know what is?!?
Not disagreeing there, but wait 5 years, Apples already trying hard to make inroads into the server market, and is upgrading its existing server range and introducing a new range of larger servers soon.
Oxymoron?
To be honest all this debate depends how you define servers and what you use them for.
hope they don't kill mysql
Oracle bought Sun to make cash cows out of their few successful products, not kill them.
It's not like there is a set of communities out there that will go over the "discarded" Sun-tech, and decide their fate. Sure, some projects might use some of that stuff, and some might go un-used. But there's nothing stopping Sun-employees and clients from forming a new community that will look over those technologies.
And it's not like the OS-communities are required to maintain all the code that corporations decide to open-source. They will use it if it helps them, but if it doesn't, they will not waste their time with it.
I sometimes get a feeling that many companies make bunch of code open source, and then expect the various communities to start working on it just like that. But it doesn't quite work that way.
In the end, it's up to Oracle/Sun to decide the fate of the unneeded technologies, not open source communities. Sure, if they think that they have no need for them, it would be great if they were open sourced. But that does not guarantee that someone is going to pick them up and start working on them. What it does is that it gives them the opportunity to do just that. But it's not guaranteed.
Sun is the 3rd biggest player in the server market with 15% of the market share, if that isnt dominance then i dont know what is?!?
If you are third biggest player in the market with 15% market-share, you do not "dominate" the market. Not by any stretch of the imagination. If you were the biggest and you had something like 60+% market-share, then you might be.
Apple has been selling servers for quite some time now, and their market-share has remained below 1%. I don't see anything in the future that is going to change that.
Um, no? Just because you are the biggest, does not mean that you "dominate" the market. Server-business is such that no single player dominates it. MS has about.... what, 30-40% market-share? that's a big share, sure, but they do not dominate the market. Do you want to see domination? Look at MS's share in the desktops. Server-business is sufficiently fragmented to make sure that no single player dominates it. Not even the company with the biggest market-share.
Toyota is the biggest car-maker in the world. Does that mean that they "dominate" the market? No they do not.
Imo they should make open office, closed office, put a good team of engineers on it, revamp it and sell it at fractions of ms office prices while agressively marketing it and offering training on it, so that we finally see someone putting the nail on that money grabbing vampire that is ms office.
Oracle and Sun have business dealings in the way back time machine error (Thinking Machines). Oracle took a lot of their early Parallel computing and Data Mining from that effort. Sun took the hardware portion of that effort. I'm sure there has been some pretty long term patent sharing from that as well.
I have to agree though, I don't expect Sparc to last all that much longer...
Sparc has been the last of the independent chipmakers in the datacenter other than Intel and IBM. Even HP gave up on Alpha, which I thought was a big mistake.
I would think Larry "the Ego" Ellison would love to Ninja the crap out of Ballmer and use it just to piss him off. I don't see it going anywhere. It might actually get better support being an Oracle Product.
Oracle is Evil. They are unavoidable though, since they have the DB market pretty locked up. Sybase comes in a distant third for Large Datacenter Class databases. IBM is a vendor locked solution.
I think the biggest issue here is that Oracle Sales are a bunch of slimy douchebags. I don't think you'll find many who'll disagree with that statement.
MySQL was forked (several times IIRC) as soon as Sun aquired MySQL AG. A large number of Oracles development, Application framework and management tools are written in Java, so that's most likely not going anywhere either.
OpenOffice.org pretty much runs as its own entity already so there isn't much Oracle needs to do there.
No, the problems are Solaris and Sun's hardware, neither of which Oracle has any immediate need for. They have partnered with HP for hardware for a while, and made that relationship closer recently and they have moved form Solaris being the premier Oracle DB platform to development being done on Linux and then ported from there.
Hmm ... I was hoping the rumors about Apple and Sun might come true. Maybe if the economy had been better, Apple might have been willing to spend some of that cash reserve on an acquisition like this, but not today.
I'm not sure about antitrust issues. Is there no one competing with Oracle?
I am still waiting for the Apple connection, after all, Larry Ellison is one of Jobs' buddies -- and of course Apple's adopting ZFS... I think we might see some big Apple Server hardware in the future, somehow via an Oracle/SUN partnership -- it's at least a more likely possibility now...
Hmm ... I was hoping the rumors about Apple and Sun might come true. Maybe if the economy had been better, Apple might have been willing to spend some of that cash reserve on an acquisition like this, but not today.
I'm not sure about antitrust issues. Is there no one competing with Oracle?
Apple would probably be a good fit for Sun, but not the other way around. Apple has done really well in the Consumer market, but Sun is a Datacenter type of company, clearly not Apples forte'.
In terms of synergies (yes, another way overused word), Sun is a good fit for Oracle software wise. Not sure what they are going to do about the Hardware divisions. My guess is that it will be packaged up and sold off after some amount of time.
There is a substantial installed base of sparc servers; sparc will not disappear for several years at least. But I think it's a real possibility that Oracle will sell off the sparc business, and Fujitsu would be the most likely buyer.
If Sun dominated the server market it wouldn't be a dying company or an acquisition target.
Apple will never go anywhere in the enterprise business unless it makes its future product roadmap more transparent. Companies want to see a strategy they can plan their business around for several years, not software and hardware schedules that are kept secret up to the moment of release. And most enterprises are going to be leery of trusting their datacenter needs to a company that puts its main emphasis on consumer electronics in any case.
Apple Connection
How's this for connecting to Apple:
1. Oracle just this month shipped support for new-fangled MacTel hardware (previously, if you wanted to use Oracle with OS X you had to find a run-down old G5 in a garage sale). As sad as that sounds, it places it on the forefront of top-tier RDBMS vendors in supporting Apple.
2. As a result, Apple is set to finally see some movement on their XServe lines (I personally know a ton of customers of my company who are raring to place Apple hardware orders just as soon as we support the new Oracle platform on non-ancient hardware).
3. Sun was, is, and may continue to be a significant (certainly on the same scale or higher than Apple, I believe) player in the rack-mount server hardware market.
Will Oracle continue to support Mactel hardware moving forward? Or, will such support shift from a borderline diversion to wholly competitive to their own businesses?
How's this for connecting to Apple:
1. Oracle just this month shipped support for new-fangled MacTel hardware (previously, if you wanted to use Oracle with OS X you had to find a run-down old G5 in a garage sale). As sad as that sounds, it places it on the forefront of top-tier RDBMS vendors in supporting Apple.
2. As a result, Apple is set to finally see some movement on their XServe lines (I personally know a ton of customers of my company who are raring to place Apple hardware orders just as soon as we support the new Oracle platform on non-ancient hardware).
3. Sun was, is, and may continue to be a significant (certainly on the same scale or higher than Apple, I believe) player in the rack-mount server hardware market.
Will Oracle continue to support Mactel hardware moving forward? Or, will such support shift from a borderline diversion to wholly competitive to their own businesses?
If Oracle is smart they'd take all the software and sell-off the hardware business to the likes of IBM, HP, Dell, or even
Apple will never buy the hardware division. If anything they need the software one but that's really not for sale. Actually noone will buy the hardware division alone. It would be interesting to see if Oracle can become the next big blue. They are more or less the de facto standard for financial db and now you will also be able to buy the machine and the OS from them. MS has a lot to loose from a deal like this but time will tell.
This was already mentioned but just to clear some of the confusion up
http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf
Sorry, poorly worded... Your really down to IBM and Intel controlling the worlds majority of datacenter chips. Even HP has gone Intel for their line up of products. They gave up both PA Risc and Alpha development for Intel. MIPS died a painful death and those went into their Tandem Non-Stop's.
Intel isn't really one of those big innovators. They have time to market down, and can really beat IBM to the punch, but in terms of pure innovation, IBM and even AMD as well as ARM have been giving them a beating.
It's only lately that Intel has come back to displace AMD's dominance for the last couple of years. That was mainly by incorporating QPI (borrowed that from AMD) and die shrink as well as optimizations. Itanium has been pretty slow out of the gate, but has actually morphed into a decent platform with Itanium2. I just don't think it's enough to survive long term though.
Open source and public domain media has been re-privatized before (i.e: MS buying the Bettmann Archive). And I don't like the statement that Sun is "ripe for cost-cutting." That sounds like a slash-and-burn mentality, ignoring the incredible contributions that Sun has made. Where there's no appreciation of a company's history during an acquisition, that company is often gutted.
This sounds good on the surface. But business decisions can force companies to abandon their magnanimous plans. There's a lot more money to be made for Oracle if Sun's technologies are privatized. Personally, I hope it does all stay open source.
I hope that this purchase will not effect the java licensing and hopefully openoffice will remain open!
You're right - this was a deal made for the benefit of shareholders, not for company history and not for the best interest of the employees.
Sun is over 20% owned by Southeastern Asset Management. In recent months they had decided that their Sun investment was not going to pay off and they needed to cut their losses. When the IBM deal fell through, they engineered the deal with Oracle and let Sun's board know that if the board didn't take it they would put in a new board who would. Sun's legacy founders and executives had no choice in this matter.
I'm not sure about antitrust issues. Is there no one competing with Oracle?
What antitrust? Oracle will just become a good IBM now.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363
"The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracles largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris."
