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Oracle to buy Sun

It sounds a bit sci fi really doesn’t it?  “Oracle to buy Sun”.  This is today’s big news in the IT industry.  Big in that it involves $7.4 Billion in cash.  Also big in that it brings together two heavy hitting names  in a marriage that I believe will create a single company where the sum will indeed be greater than the parts. 

As someone who has been part of three successful company acquisitions in recent years, although not quite on the same scale as Oracle, I can identify with their CEO Larry Ellison 🙂

If you are in the IT industry you will understand the dynamics that the combination of the components of Oracle and Sun will bring to the party. Oracle will now own a complete stack, right up from physical hardware through operating systems, programming languages and applications. Its products will become more competitive as these components become optimised to work with each other.

Looking at it on a personal level Timico uses a range of products from both vendors. Oracle databases power our VoIP platform together with Sun hardware. Our storage product, KeVault, uses Sun’s Java language. Sun’s mysql database powers half the ISP industry (the other half uses postgresql).

Hopefully the acquisition will not constrain the feature development of products such as mysql. Certainly Oracle will see Java as a prize and I can’t imagine Larry Ellison would sideline “Open Office” considering his long standing “rivalry” with Bill Gates.  We do live in interesting times.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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