It has been a week since the news of the mega deal about Oracle acquiring Sun broke. In the week that went by every body and their cousin has written about this deal. It might even be the most searched term in Googlosphere.
In the meanwhile I have met with many people who have been dissecting this deal from all angles. From what would happen to the people from Sun to how would Oracle – “the hardware vendor” stack up in the marketplace. So I thought it was time for a follow-0n post on this. My first post was a immediate reaction and rationalization of the deal announcement. In this post I will go into some of the key areas and see how things might shake up.
Solaris: Sun has been a leader in this space and has brought fantastic technologies like ZFS, Dynamic Tracing, Container Virtualization, Predictive Self Healing, besides the great list of customers that come with it. So albeit not its forte, Oracle would do all it can to retain all the brains that make up the Solaris team. This will single-handedly allow it to compete better with IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat. Oracle has been investing a lot of resources to enhance (Oracle Unbreakable or Oracle Enterprise) Linux. I would see efforts there scaling down and resources focussed towards Solaris. From what I hear this is what they did with their Application Server(Oracle Application Server) and CRM(Oracle CRM) products when they acquired a better product BEA and Siebel respectively.
Java: A lot of ink has been spilt on this topic by the Java enthusiasts. On what would happen to JCP, what would IBM do?, Will it back off of Java now that Oracle will take charge and potentially dismantle JCP. Yes, Oracle true to its nature will have more to say on JCP and the direction Java will take compared to Sun (which had a lot to say but lot of it was bent on how they can make a dime or two on it). Look for IBM and Oracle to have equal seats on the JCP table and stear this forward given that both have a lot resting on Java. So if you are java camp at Sun – you should be happy. Atleast someone who knows how to monetize all the R&D dollars is taking over.
MySQL: This is one area where millions of posts have been written all over the world. A quick search on “Oracle kill mysql” yielded 643,000 results. I am sure variants of the same topic might be in the millions. A couple of renowned bloggers Matt Mullenweg and Josh Greenbaum chime in with thoughts that are poles apart. I share some of thoughts from both. As Matt mentions, Oracle can kill the development that is being done by MySQL team within but not what is already out there. Companies like Google which have their own development team working on MySQL will continue to do so and if necessary do a fork. There are already rumblings of the original team of MySQL doing a fork and continuing their development. Praise the GPL!!. On the other hand, Oracle can really use MySQL to go after lower end deals where Microsoft is operating and also use it as the basis for its Cloud infrastructure.
Identity Management: This is a clear addition to Oracle. Sun Identity Management was clear leader in the industry besides Microsoft especially in the Health Sciences space. So Oracle will do the swap here (for their laggard product) much like BEA and Siebel.
People: (the non-mentioned asset according to Jonathan Schwartz’s note to employees). If you are in HR, Finance and Marketing – good luck with your job hunt. If you are in the support, internal tech ops – forget your golfing or badminton or whatever it is that you do in the evenings. You will have a lesser colleagues and more work. But you will have a job. Hurray!
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