Oracle acquires Sun Microsystems – What happens to MySQL?
Web1.0’s major casualty, Sun has finally landed up in Oracle’s lap – for $9.50 a share in a deal valued at $7.4 billion.
Oracle will pay a premium of $2.81 a share, or 42%, over Sun Micro’s closing price of $6.69 a share on Friday. Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. – source
Sun is one of the best examples of platform play gone awfully wrong.
While Java is one of the most deployed platform, Sun’s vision of selling it’s Solaris server business never picked up – primarily because of tight integration between product components which were way too costly (maintenance included).
Infact, Java as a platform-play was restricted to deep-pocketed enterprises only and the biggest competition came from LAMP world – slowly, they started losing developer love (after all, how many new age startups are running on Java?).
Majority of Sun’s $13.9 billion annual revenue comes from high-end servers and storage systems (all based on Java), while the market started shifting to less-expensive/open source servers (LAMP). Even open-sourcing Java didn’t help – the market evolved faster than Sun could think of (ironically, they have one of the best ‘organized’ developer communities!).
Platform that couldn’t sustain the lack of a solid business model – Sun portrayed Java as the next potion, just that it was internally paralyzed to sell that potion.
Couple of questions on post-Sun acquisition:
- What will happen to Sun’s open-source initiatives? Oracle was never an initiator to open source – so what’s the incentive for them to keep the show running?
- What about MySQL – a direct competition to Oracle’s core, i.e. Oracle DB? Will it meet the same fate as Siebel?
- Will SUN products end up as just-another-stack in Oracle’s business?
This is surely, end of an era.
Oracle - Don't let the Sun go down on me
What’s your opinion?
Also see: SUN shines on MYSQL
Reaction from Social Media:
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
[...] http://www.pluggd.in/technology/oracle-sun-acquisition-4027/ 2) [...]
Oracle & Sun h’ve been strategic Parterns for many years. Sun Couldn’t Afford of $1 billion on the company generating merely $60 million in revenue which is working outside of its competencies.
Then you can wonder who helped to buy it ?. Its orcale who afford this deal stenches from the top to the bottom.
MySql will be eclipsed with Oracle DB eventually.
Awesome Larry by indirectly killing MySql.
Sun Couldn’t Afford of $1 billion on the company = “MySQL”
MySQL may be gone or best case kept stagnant as entry level db (same way MSFT has Access. Not to worry as people will start evaluating other open source database alternatives such as Ingres and Postgres. In open source its easy…This deal is not about Oracle trying to kill open source…they know they cant do that…but its about increasing profits in times of IT budget cuts by making Sun’s massive HW business profitable…workforce slashes are to be expected. ORCL I think will keep OpenSolaris alive and kicking since it would be a great counterweight to Redhat Linux. ORCL tried with its own unbreakable Linux which has not found much traction. This should cause especially HP, Cisco, MSFT, Dell to take notice and start competing strategies…
[...] http://www.pluggd.in/technology/oracle-sun-acquisition-4027/ http://blogs.computerworld.com/oracle_sun_what_happens_to_mysql [...]
[...] indulgence and not of any commercial value, would Oracle buy an open source competitor (they acquired Sun, who acquired MySQL) [...]
Once an open source, always an open source. I guess nothing a more spectacular future, when some other company would buy Oracle…for the same reasons.