IBM: Who Cares About Sun/Oracle, Anyway?
Yesterday’s biggest news was Oracle’s purchase of Sun. Oracle swooped in and nabbed Sun right from under IBM’s nose, or so it seemed.
Talk about IBM buying the company spanned weeks. Despite initial discussions falling through, Sun had allegedly told IBM they would agree to breathe new life into old discussions as long as Big Blue made a solid commitment to buy. Two days later, it was all over and apparently, IBM couldn’t care less.
IBM was going to get a ton of press either way. If it had purchased the struggling Sun, we’d want to know why and what the company had planned for its newest acquisition. If someone else purchased Sun, we’d want to know why IBM let the company get away and what the company thought Sun’s chances were under its new parent company. CFO at IBM Mark Loughridge did what ZDNet describes as, “the conference call equivalent of a shoulder shrug,” yesterday.
“What’s really changed? I think nothing,” Loughridge stated boldly.
We don’t even know where to start with that one, except to say Sun and Oracle, along with nearly everyone else in the industry, disagree.
Yesterday Oracle described Java as the most important piece of software the company had ever acquired. President Safra Catz also detailed just how lucrative the Sun purchase would be for Oracle. Sure, that might mean squat to IBM, but try this: Recent rumors say Oracle may hold on to Sun’s software and shed or sell its hardware divisions to the likes of HP. However, until that day comes, Oracle has entered the hardware market and over night has become a huge player in the game. To say that kind of acquisition changes nothing is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, “Lalalalalalala.”
They're just one of the biggest database companies in the world. I happen to be running a version of Oracle right now. It's working properly right now **crosses fingers**
In the long run, say 24+ months, Oracle will have a chance to use Java to its advantage. This is the real concern for IBM but is far enough out that they can deal with it. This merger is more of a risk to Oracle than it is to IBM.
Oracle is already taking advantage of Java, it can be used as a stored procedure language since Oracle 9i (even latest Oracle 8 using some "add-on"). On a side-note, I'd like to remind people that Sun acquired MySQL last year so Oracle is now an even bigger database player.
It is only now with them working on the Global Foundries product and trying to hit the 28nm line before Intel and skipping the whole 32nm generation that AMD MIGHT have a chance to catch back up.
BTW, I'm no fanboy, my last 2 CPUs were AMD, now on a C2D and I switched back-and-forth between NVidia and ATI for the past years as well.
I don't think Oracle's remotely interested in a lot of Sun's other pieces, but they'll tear Sun up, and sell those pieces to HP or other interested buyers. (HP, would probably jump at the opportunity to acquire some of Sun's Data Storage hardware tech, and the like).
When you look at the details of the deal, Oracle will pay for most of Sun with their own money, gain back the rest when they gut Sun, and sell scraps to a company like HP, and then they basically get Java and MySQL for free.
IBM doesn't care? Good luck with DB2 now, fuckers.
The rest will have to wait still for all the official paper work to go through. A large acquisition like this has to pass the SEC scrutiny i'm sure it will draw so it will probably be a year at least efore Oracle will really even be able to use any of Sun's assests for any kind of market stance. so for now, nothing really has changed.
I have some doubts now about this aquisition which time will bring the answer... some:
- Will Oracle keep or sell the Sun HW division?
- What will be HP (and other traditional partners) position about Oracle, now that it also sells servers, storage, backup robots and operating systems?
- What impact on profit and stability this huge aquisition will have on Oracle business?
- What will Oracle do about the Open SW? (think on OpenOffice).
- How will Solaris affect the Oracle SW development and products?
etc, etc, etc.
I'm still supporting AMD the day until Intel loses its monopolistic grasp on the market. I support AMD not because it's better, it's because it's the only competition left and I support competition.
i disagree, oracle will eventually figure out how bad of a deal this was and will be carving sun up and looking for buyers for the different parts as it tries to salvage things. what does oracle know about hardware, operating systems, ect. buying a company does not given you the wisdom of what do to with it. oracle will be letting go of a lot of sun employees as it looks to cut costs, sun as very wasteful and oracle is like 30% profit margins. so it will look to cut the waste, all those open source projects that don't make money, all the hardware ect...