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IBM: Who Cares About Sun/Oracle, Anyway?

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 35 comments

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.”

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Top Comments
  • 11 Hide
    B-Unit , April 21, 2009 1:45 PM
    What rock have you been living under?
Other Comments
  • 11 Hide
    B-Unit , April 21, 2009 1:45 PM
    What rock have you been living under?
  • Display all 35 comments.
  • 0 Hide
    fatedtodie , April 21, 2009 1:56 PM
    It may be a game changer in the business or it may be nothing. A lot depends on how Oracle deals with the Sun assets. So IBM is right, at this point nothing has changed but... 6-12 months from now? IBM could be in trouble or... Oracle might not be able to handle the new markets and may lose big time like AMD did with the purchase of ATI. AMD STILL hasn't recovered from the dent that put in their processor lines.
  • 5 Hide
    tenor77 , April 21, 2009 1:59 PM
    yoda8232I don't care tbh, I never even heard of Oracle until now.


    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**
  • 6 Hide
    Zenthar , April 21, 2009 2:17 PM
    fatedtodieAMD STILL hasn't recovered from the dent that put in their processor lines.
    Maybe it's just me, but I'm under the impression that for about a year ATI is keeping AMD afloat. I know the merge wasn't easy, they were trying to unify (and still are) their process and structure, but in the end the ATI division did much better than AMD in the last year.
  • 1 Hide
    havo , April 21, 2009 2:44 PM
    What's changed? Oracle has no experience in the hardware market and there is no "magic combo" that will come out of this that IBM has to fear. In fact IBM gets to take advantage of the uncertainty of the Sun platform to sell more servers. Everything else stays the same. They compete against Sun on the hardware platform just like they did before.

    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.
  • 0 Hide
    Zenthar , April 21, 2009 2:59 PM
    The only "magic" IBM could "fear" on the WH side is Oracle licensing in regard to Sun CPUs (Oracle license is on a per CPU/core basis). Other than that Sun isn't that big of a player in the HW business IMO. However, IBM already invested a lot in Java, that might be the more stressful aspect.

    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.
  • -8 Hide
    dark_lord69 , April 21, 2009 3:09 PM
    I DON'T
  • -5 Hide
    fatedtodie , April 21, 2009 3:32 PM
    @Zenthar The problem is AMD was a Processor competitor to Intel. Before AMD took on ATI (and to buy them they had to take out a HUGE multi-billion dollar loan) they were a pretty steady competitor. It was a fanboy choice of AMD or Intel, the specs were pretty close. then ATI... boom AMD becomes a non player again in the CPU market, they lose market share by the day...

    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.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , April 21, 2009 3:39 PM
    Why are they excited to get their hands on Java? It's a useful technology, but I wouldn't think it would suit the needs of a high end product like Oracle. Symantec based their antivirus management console on it and look how well that played out for them. Unusable almost describes it.
  • 2 Hide
    Zenthar , April 21, 2009 3:48 PM
    fatedtodie then ATI... boom AMD becomes a non player again in the CPU market, they lose market share by the day...
    Mmm, that is anecdotal evidence (the way it is presented at least), like saying the decline of piracy is causing global warming. What caused AMD's drop isn't their ATI acquisition, it's Intel's tremendous come-back from the P4 architecture with C2D and Phenom I's inability to follow the steep improvement. One could even say was never that good, it was only Intel being bad.

    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.
  • 1 Hide
    fulle , April 21, 2009 3:55 PM
    The way I look at it, is you had a company in Sun, that was over-bloated and unprofitable... but holding valuable patents and technology. The way most of Sun's software was currently marketed, was retarded, but that doesn't mean that Oracle couldn't turn things like Java into powerful money making products for them.

    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.
  • 0 Hide
    Zenthar , April 21, 2009 3:56 PM
    Java has it's pros and cons, unfortunately the Swing GUIs are probably a big "con" and is what most people perceive.
  • 1 Hide
    bfstev , April 21, 2009 3:59 PM
    I believe IBM has a stake in Java development so I'm assuming there was some kind of agreement in there that would help protect IBM from being hurt by any leveraging of the JAva platform. So i doubt they have any reason to worry about that part.

    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.
  • -1 Hide
    Zenthar , April 21, 2009 4:01 PM
    Mmmm, one aspect I just though of: Solaris/OpenSolaris. IBM still has AIX, and Redhat used to be the "reference enterprise Linux OS" for Oracle ...
  • 0 Hide
    powerbaselx , April 21, 2009 5:07 PM
    Sun is more important for Oracle than for IBM.
    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.
  • 1 Hide
    deltatux , April 21, 2009 5:10 PM
    If the Sun hardware division gets sold off, it just bolster Intel's quest for monopolization as SPARC might not live on which can be a problem. Less architectures means less competition in the end.

    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.
  • -2 Hide
    fuser , April 21, 2009 6:02 PM
    IBM would have outsourced all of the Sun jobs. The Oracle purchase is better for Sun employees.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , April 21, 2009 7:04 PM
    What do you think will happen to mySQL after this ??
  • 0 Hide
    jsloan , April 21, 2009 7:06 PM
    fuserIBM would have outsourced all of the Sun jobs. The Oracle purchase is better for Sun employees.


    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...
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