A Big Day In The Enterprise IT World
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Enterprise, Server on
It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley. It’s also been a busy few days in boardrooms in the towns around San Jose. While Apple has been burning the midnight oil at One Infinite Loop while plotting this year’s MacWorld strategy, the lawyers’ Lexus convertibles have been powering up and down 101 with the documents that detailed this morning’s announcements.
Oracle buying BEA wasn’t a surprise, the two companies have been engaged in a takeover struggle for some time, and BEA’s capitulation, if not quite a foregone conclusion, was certainly on the cards. Sun’s purchase of MySQL came out of the blue. It’s actually quite logical though, as Sun has been moving away from its proprietary roots since Jonathan Schwartz took control of the corporate rudder.
Still, there are going to be some worried customers out there. Both Sun and Oracle have a history of buying companies and slowly killing innovative products in favour of their own solutions. MySQL is probably too entrenched to be replaced (though SQLite is getting a lot of usage), and it also fills in a gap in Sun’s product portfolio. BEA’s web services-driven middleware strategy is certainly at risk, as Oracle already has its own application server and web services platform. BEA may have an edge in performance - especially now that its JVM and application server are able to run in a VM without an operating system, something that Oracle has been looking for for a long time.
Consolidation in the enterprise IT world has been going on for some time, and now it’s the application server stack’s turn. This is just the first $10 billion dollars of what looks like it’s going to be an expensive year for the big vendors - so let’s hope the costs don’t get passed on to the rest of us…
–Simon
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Loading ...Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - January 18, 2008 on 7:30 am
Every time Oracle makes an acquisition, I wonder how many of its existing customers it’s buying, sometimes for the third or fourth time…
-Mary
Comment by Jagdip Grewal - January 19, 2008 on 6:13 pm
So basically we will end up with Oracle vs IBM in the Java Enterprise market versus Redmond. It will be interesting to see if the fully integrated stack from Oracle (SOA suite, App server, db) closes out some of the open source possibilities in enterprise. Oracle will bundle up the products at an attractive price and provide end to end support and operational monitoring, a pretty powerful proposition.
Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - January 21, 2008 on 7:21 am
Interesting to see *when* the fully integrated stack makes it out the door two. Does Oracle stop and go back to add more every time another straggler is rounded up or is Fusion just such a big undertaking that it takes this long…
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