Monday 20 April 2009

Oracle outshines Sun

This week started fairly quietly, but has got more interesting as the day progressed, especially with the news that SUN (one of our major suppliers) has been taken over by Oracle (another one of our major suppliers). It will be interesting (I hope not in the Chinese sense of the word) to see what effect that has. Oracle now owns Java, and more importantly, MySQL - a rival database to its own. It's already been referred to as myToast by the ZDnet blog. Should big users of MySQL, like Google, be worried?

What will happen to the SUN hardware that all of our systems run on? Given Oracle's relationship with other hardware suppliers including Dell, HP and IBM, will it all survive? The impact on open source software such as OpenOffice will also be closely watched.

As a major SUN user I'm glad they were taken over rather than just go bust, and I think the deal with Oracle will be better for us than if the IBM one had succeded, but I can't believe it's not going to affect us. The Guardian technology blog says that SUN boss Jonathan Schwartz has been known as My Little Pony, but Larry Ellison from Oracle is reputedly somewhat closer to Ming the Merciless - an interesting match!


3 comments:

Ceri Davies said...

MySQL is open source, so it will only go away if nobody is interested in maintaining it any more.

That seems to be a non-issue though, as Oracle have already said that they intend to keep it alive - see http://www.oracle.com/sun/sun-faq.pdf.

I think the worst case scenario for us would be for Oracle to start charging by the CPU for Solaris!

Graham Hill said...

At ERC there was a "no comment" comment throughout which always leaves you thinking that there's more going on than they can say - but that was all around IBM and no-one was mentioning Oracle. And they have/had several billion in cash in the bank? mind you that probably isn't a good place to keep it these days. See you Wednesday! Graham

thevoice@voicedup.com said...

A survey conducted by Citigroup amongst major institutional investors provided the following insight on todays markets:
The favored sector is Tech and this sector has held the top position over the last 12 months. Growth stocks are also a hot item of late, the market sees the economy in a more positive view for the second half of the year and this should bode well for growth stocks. An additional upside of 6% is expected from current market levels to the end of the year. The majority of this optimism is due to the market rally since March, investors believe the market has bottomed. Regardless of the expected drop (approximately 20%) in earnings this year, a common consensus is the rebound in 2010 will be in the double digits. I’m certain Oracle has this information in mind prior to its acquisition.