Oracle Buys Sun
Looks like Sun is setting as an independent company - Oracle is buying them out at $9.50 a share:
Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.
Oracle isn't a hardware company, and hasn't ever been a hardware company - so it should be interesting to see what happens in that regard. Sun's been getting killed as intel commodity hardware has moved relentlessly up stack, so it wouldn't surprise me to see most of Sun's hardware disappear.
Oracle also hasn't been that big a player in the OSS space, so it's unclear to me what will happen there. I expect to see MySQL become more compatible with the eponymous Oracle database, in order to make upsells more possible for large scale users of MySQL.
Finally, I'd say this adds a lot of question marks on Java as well. Does Oracle take the IBM route, and create a Java foundation? Or do they suck it back into the more closed Oracle world? Anyone want to guess how long Schwartz stays on in any capacity?
Comments
long enough
[ Troy Brumley] April 20, 2009 12:18:03.230
Comment by Troy Brumley
He stays long enough to strap on the golden parachute.
I Guessed Right?
[W^L+] April 20, 2009 21:54:18.250
I speculated that the IBM negotiations were a tactic to attract Larry Ellison's attention. Looks like I might have guessed correctly.
[Claus] April 21, 2009 10:29:12.020
Oracle is said to use a lot of Java in the database internally - and I think somewhere it is stated that Oracles dev environment is Solaris on Sparc.
The best hope for smalltalkers would be that Oracle wants to make money off Java software licenses, then Smalltalk would be competition as well.
Cant see it happening, though.
What I think Oracle did is to get a foot in the door in more areas. It hasnt been too long that they bought Peoplesoft (CRM stuff), now they own an OS and a language and some hardware as well.
Of course, buying off MySql developers would have been easier to gain MySQL. I do not really believe that MySQL was the only reason to buy Sun. In fact, quite the opposite, just a nice additional feature.