Oracle acquisitions

The EU grants Oracle another six days to prepare its case on MySQL

The European Union (EU) has not been making Oracle’s acquisition of Sun an easy one, putting the “acquisition machine” in quite a different situation than it’s used to.

The deal, which has already been approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, came under scrutiny by the EU in September, when European regulators expressed concern over many parts of the takeover, especially Oracle’s pending ownership of Sun’s MySQL open source database.

Then, earlier this month, the European Commission (EC) released a Formal Statement of Objections against the deal.  The EC said that Oracle has not yet shown evidence that the deal does not violate European laws regulating unfair competition. Oracle responded with its own statement, which included that the acquisition “does not threaten to reduce competition in the slightest, including the database market,” and the EC’s concerns about MySQL show that they do not understand the idea of open source.

Now, however, it looks like European regulators are giving Oracle something they want — or are they?

Oracle has asked for more time to develop its argument against the EC’s concerns, and the EC announced today that it would extend the deadline of its antitrust review of the deal from Jan. 19 to Jan. 27.

But is an extra six working days really enough time?

That remains to be seen, but it does look like European regulators aren’t the only ones working against Oracle. For example, Florian Mueller, coordinating opposition to Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems and MySQL, sent a note today applauding the news that the EU granted Oracle a delay - but for a different reason than Oracle may have.

“If the EU’s objections were baseless, Oracle wouldn’t need more time now to develop its arguments. The best way Oracle can make use of this extra week is to think really hard about selling MySQL to a suitable third party,” he wrote.

Is there any chance that the EU will approve the deal with so many objections? We’ll now have to wait an extra six days to find out.

‘Father of Java’ outlines what you may not know about Sun Software at OpenWorld

What do Brazil’s tax system, Amazon’s Kindle reader and South Korea’s first magnesium sheet plant have in common?

At first glance it may seem like nothing, but these systems share something with approximately 10 billion other devices in the world — Java.

As the ‘Father of Java’ James Gosling pointed out in an OpenWorld session Monday, the number of Java devices on the planet is even greater than the number of people.  So as Oracle takes control of the technology with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, they definitely have their work cut out for them. As Gosling went through his presentation, ‘The Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Software at Sun,’ it quickly became clear that there were easily more than ten.

While you might think of Java Enterprise Edition when you think of Java, Gosling said that EE is just the tip of the iceberg.  The Java Runtime Environment has an average of 15 million downloads a week, and even more during busy weeks — like when there’s a new release or it’s tax season in Brazil. According to Gosling, Brazil uses Java apps to manage its tax system, and residents can even use their cell phones to file their taxes.

Speaking of cell phones, Java also runs on approximately 2.6 billion mobile devices. Gosling pointed out that, with the exception of the Apple iPhone, it’s hard to buy a non-Java cell phone. At the JavaOne conference in June, when Ellison discussed new opportunities for using Java and JavaFX on mobile devices, Sun’s Scott McNealy joked with the Oracle CEO that he should discuss this with his good friend Steve Jobs.

Though Java doesn’t run on the iPhone, it certainly runs on a lot of other devices - from real-time scanning of vehicle geometry on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the POSCO Magnesium Mill in South Korea.

Here are some other things about Sun software you may not know (and if you do, are important to remember):

• Think Java is slow? Gosling says that this hasn’t been true for at least a decade, and that HotSpot, Java’s virtual machine, beats C/C++ and Fortran (usually) in performance.
• It’s important to pay attention to issues encountered when working with multicore processors. The average machine currently has 4 cores, but in the year 2030 it could have many as 5220 cores, Gosling said. In the enterprise world you often get a “free pass,” as EE frameworks usually deal with multicore issues easily.
• GlassFish is the world’s most downloaded app server, with nearly a million downloads a month. As Gosling showed on a JavaFX map, the world is infested with GlassFish “like a bad horror movie.”
• The “magic piece” of Java is the virtual machine, not the programming language. Many languages can run on the Java Virtual Machine: Scala, Ruby on Rails, Groovy/Grails, Python, Javascript and more.
• OpenSolaris’ ZFS, a new data management system, is what Gosling calls “a religious experience.”

And this is just the beginning. While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype surrounding Sun’s hardware, make sure you take the time to learn about its software, too.

Larry the hardware guy sends IBM a message

It was less than a month ago that many Sun customers were concerned about Oracle’s silence on the future of Sun’s hardware.  But it looks like Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison has taken the first steps in breaking that silence.

While Ellison is usually known for his memorable quotes and speeches, this time he took a different approach for getting his point across.

Last Wednesday, Oracle ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal. The ad, which also ran on Oracle’s web site, lays out Oracle’s plans for Sun’s hardware and operating system, specifically SPARC and Solaris. The ad, which can be seen here, is aimed at Sun’s customers assuring them that Oracle will spend more money developing SPARC and Solaris than Sun has, have more than twice as many hardware specialists and dramatically improve the performance of Sun’s hardware.

But what’s missing from the ad?

As  Infoworld’s Savio Rodrigues points out,  Oracle fails to mention anything about MySQL. According to Rodrigues, this could be for a number of reasons — for example, it’s understandable Oracle makes no mention of any of Sun’s software products like MySQL or Java, since Oracle already has competing products in the software business.  But as Rodrigues says, isn’t Oracle concerned in making sure that Sun’s software customers feel protected?

Well, maybe not. At least in this case, the ad may be geared more toward IBM and its recent fight against Oracle than reassuring Sun customers.  According to Information Week, IBM has been trying to win Sun customers from Oracle by offering “Sun-set specials” for those who migrate to their Power hardware running AIX Unix.

But now Ellison seems determined to not let IBM profit off the uncertainty of Oracle’s future with Sun, especially as the uncertainty grew earlier this month when the European Commission prolonged its investigation of the deal.

Ellison had this to say at the end of the ad: “We’re in it to win it. IBM, we’re looking forward to competing with you in the hardware business.”

What do you think? Is this a sign that Oracle is going to start divulging more information to customers about the deal? Or is this simply an attack on IBM?

The DOJ approves Oracle’s Sun acquisition: Now what?

It’s been four months since Oracle announced its planned acquisition of Sun, and today the Department of Justice gave Oracle the green light to move forward with its takeover.  But the past four months have been filled with numerous questions and concerns –many of which are still applicable — about the deal among both Oracle and Sun users.

Here’s a quick look back at some of our significant Oracle-Sun coverage of the past four months:

April:

• Oracle announces that it will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion

• Questions begin to emerge, such as: What does this mean for hardware, MySQL and enterprise Java?

May

• Larry Ellison confirms that Oracle will keep Sun’s hardware business, including its disk storage and tape backup business.

• Oracle president Charles Phillips discusses the Sun acquisition publicly for the first time at the Collaborate ‘09 conference in Orlando. The conference also addresses some of users’ questions about the deal, such as: what will Oracle do with MySQL?

• Companies prepare for closer scrutiny of their Oracle license agreements as a result of the Oracle/Sun deal.

June

• The government asks Oracle for more information on the Oracle/Sun deal, specifically having to do with the way rights to Java will be licensed, which extends the Department of Justice’s 30-day review period.

July

• Controversy arises over the question: What will Oracle do with Sun’s open source operating system, OpenSolaris?

August

• The U.S. Department of Justice gives Oracle the green light for the Sun acquisition; however, the deal still has to be approved by the European Union (EU) before it can be closed.

Now that the deal is one step closer to completion, what can Oracle and Sun customers do to prepare? Some Sun customers are worried that big changes are on the way, but others are even more worried about another issue - Oracle’s silence about the deal and what to expect, especially with Sun’s flagship SPARC hardware business and how it plans to license Sun’s servers  — by the box or by the number of processors.

What is your company doing to prepare for the Sun acquisition? How is it going to affect you? Do you feel like you have the information you need, or do you think Oracle should be doing a better job of keeping you informed?

Will Oracle Sun(set) OpenSolaris? Most think not

According to ComputerWorld’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “OpenSolaris is on its way out” once the Oracle-Sun acquisition is complete.  Simply put: Oracle already has a Linux-based operating system, Unbreakable Linux,  and will have no use for another open source operating system.  Well, maybe too simply put.

What is Vaughan-Nichols basing his claims on?

He says that “Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling (him)” that OpenSolaris developers are worried about their futures after the acquisition, but he never gives any specific names or examples. While Vaughan-Nichols is entitled to his opinion, perhaps justifiably not many people are buying it.

So, what are some of the counter arguments?  Other bloggers and those commenting on Vaughan-Nichols’ blog have had little difficulty coming up with a steady stream of them including:

• Getting rid of OpenSolaris would hurt the whole Solaris Operating System, a platform that is a critical part of Sun’s roadmap.
• Dumping OpenSolaris would mean ignoring many existing OpenSolaris/Solaris customers. Compounding that problem is that many existing Oracle users now run Solaris.
• Oracle already has a multi-OS strategy including Unix, Linux and Windows.

Another reason for Oracle to hold on to OpenSolaris is stack selling. Oracle has made it clear, as recently as July 1 at its Fusion Middleware announcement, that it intends to do more selling of integrated hardware-software stacks, all the way from the chips to the disk. You can’t sell a bunch of Sun servers without the operating system that fits Oracle’s databases and middleware like a glove. It would like an Oreo cookie without the filling.

Similar speculation occurred a couple of months ago as people wondered what Oracle would do with Sun’s open source database MySQL. Like, MySQL, OpenSolaris is free and open to the community.  Therefore, even if Oracle were to abandon it, OpenSolaris could live on, the question is what would that quality of life be?  Vaughan-Nichols had this to say:

“What I’m very much afraid I see happening is that Oracle is going to let OpenSolaris and other non-core to Oracle Sun projects like MySQL and VirtualBox  wither and die on the vine without corporate support.”

But would Oracle really do this to a system that already has such a strong customer base? Do you think there’s any chance that Vaughan-Nichols is right about the future of OpenSolaris? How successful do you think MySQL or OpenSolaris could still be without Oracle’s support? Would one be more successful than the other?

Is Virtual Iron virtually gone?

A few months ago when we examined whether Oracle could be a contender in the virtualization wars, experts said that the company faced an uphill battle if it continued to refuse offering support for third-party virtualization software.  They also noted that Oracle would most likely buy Virtual Iron to compliment its own Oracle VM.

It looks like they were right.

Just over a month after buying the virtualization software vendor Virtual Iron, Oracle has announced that it will be getting rid of the company’s products.  According to an article in The Register, Oracle said in a letter to Virtual Iron’s sales partners that it “will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers.”

While this may not come as a surprise to many, it’s interesting that Oracle has decided to forgo what keeping Virtual Iron could have brought to the table in terms of products for small and medium-sized companies.

Also interesting, as The Register’s Carl Metz points out, is that Oracle would risk losing Virtual Iron customers and partners, who will be justifiably unhappy upon hearing this news.  Oracle stated that after the end of this month it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone, even existing customers.

Do you think it’s unfair to Virtual Iron customers and irresponsible for Oracle to slash VI’s  products with such short notice? While Virtual Iron customers can move to Oracle’s new combined product, Oracle has yet to say when it will be arriving, or what the combined product will actually be.

And is this any indication of what Oracle will do with Sun’s virtualization products? With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle will get Sun’s entire virtualization portfolio namely Sun xVM.  Sun xVM, like Oracle (and Virtual Iron), is based on the Xen hypervisor, making it easier for Oracle to combine products.

It should be interesting to see how Oracle’s virtualization plans develop over the coming months, and if it will prove effective in competing against virtualization kingpin, VMware.

Oracle edges closer to final approval of Sun deal

Last week, Larry Ellison spoke publicly for the first time about the Oracle-Sun deal. At Sun’s annual JavaOne conference, Ellison revealed his plans for using Java on mobile devices and swapping AJAX for Java FX on Sun’s OpenOffice product.

But when will we actually see these proposed changes take place?

We’ll be one step closer to knowing the answer to that question next month, when Sun stockholders will meet to vote on Oracle’s proposed acquisition.  Sun announced today that this meeting will take place on July 16. If it goes through, the approval will mark the end of more than seven months of negotiations between Sun and interested buyers such as Oracle, IBM and HP, according to eWeek.

Oracle first announced its agreement to acquire Sun on April 20. Until now, the software giant has remained tight-lipped on the deal, with only a brief mention of it at the Collaborate ‘09 conference in May.

But now, even with the recent announcements at JavaOne, many questions remained unanswered about the future of Sun, especially surrounding what exactly Oracle plans to do with Sun’s hardware business.

An article today in ComputerWorld suggests that Sun customers remain skeptical about Oracle’s plans for Sun and the assurances made by Ellison at the JavaOne conference.

The Sun customers interviewed in the ComputerWorld article were concerned about the future of a variety of Sun’s technologies, including Java, its Sparc architecture and its free GlassFish open-source application server.

Others were nervous not just about the technologies, but the future of the JavaOne conference itself. One attendee was quoted as saying that the conference had “the look and feel of being the end of the road for JavaOne… It was hard not to get a sense that this was the last one.”

In a recent blog post, JavaWorld’s Dustin Marx also speculates that Oracle will not continue to hold the annual conference.  First, he points out that in the current economy, it may not be feasible for Oracle to hold both Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne and still make money. Marx also points out that Oracle already has many Java-related presentations at its Oracle OpenWorld conference, and simply expanding those offerings would not be too difficult.

We’ve already looked at how the Oracle-Sun deal will affect you, but as the approval of the proposed acquisition gets closer, new questions are beginning to emerge, on everything from Oracle licensing to the future of Java and JavaOne.

As more details of the Oracle-Sun deal start to surface, what new questions or concerns do you have?  As an Oracle customer what do you think about what the Sun customers have to say? Are their concerns justified? Leave a comment or talk about this in our Oracle-Sun discussion on the IT Knowledge Exchange.

Will Oracle be the good shepherd for open source?

With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle, like it or not sports fans, is now the steward of the open source community. It is now Oracle’s opportunity to take open source technologies up to the next level of acceptance in corporate America — or not.

My guess is they will pursue that opportunity. Not necessarily out of any sense of contributing to the greater good by encouraging the spread of free software to IT shops strapped for cash in recessionary times, for instance. It would have more to do with the fact that there is money, good money, to be made by committing more deeply to open source technologies.

This should not surprise anyone. After all, this is the company that jacked up its licensing fees some 15 to 20 percent last year, right around the time the recession was crushing the economy.

I really don’t have any problems with vendors large or small, making as much money as they can from open source. If Oracle can intelligently and fairly find a way to charge Oracle and Sun users for open source products and associated technical services, it could lay down a business model that the rest of the open source world could follow. With greater revenue streams generated, more jobs can be created among both vendor and IT companies, which would result in more useful products delivered and greater productivity.

Lord knows many Linux distributors and other open source software developers have had their chance over the past decade to establish growing and profitable businesses. But with the exception of Red Hat and possibly Novell, none have succeeded at sustaining a largely open source business capable of generating hundreds of millions in revenues. Sun is the other possible exception here. A recent Goldman Sachs report estimated that the company’s Java-based revenues could approach $300 million in the current fiscal year ending in June, but even that tidy sum was enough to allow the company to continue under its own steam.

But Oracle, with revenues of $25 billion and significant market share in multiple enterprise software markets, is in a strong enough position to show the industry how real money can be made in open source world.

The biggest change Oracle has to make to achieve this goal doesn’t depend largely on clever ways of blending of open source and its proprietary products, although it will have to do some of that vis-à-vis positioning and pricing strategies, but on taking a more enlightened approach to attracting new customers. Yes, I’ll say it, we need to see a kinder, gentler Oracle coming into this market.

There is a way to achieve a balance that allows the company to continue to compete aggressively without trying to win the Albert Schweitzer Award for Humanitarianism .

And why not be kinder? The company can’t charge major companies such as IBM or SAP any more for licensing Java. Those licensing fees are protected under long term contracts and can’t be touched until they come up for renewal. The same goes for Sun’s corporate users, particularly those locked into multi-year support and maintenance deals.

Instead of tossing aside good products from Sun such as the MySQL and Glassfish, Oracle could put development monies into enhancing them and making them even more useful to customers. In doing so they could also serve as effective weapons against Microsoft in the lower end of the market. More than a few open source users have told me they would be willing to pay for products such as MySQL and Glassfish if they can continue to deliver good ROI and be properly maintained for a reasonable fee.

There is no need for Oracle to be overly protective (read greedy) of its higher end proprietary databases and applications. That business is solid and under no immediate competitive threats, even from IBM.

I’ll give Oracle the benefit of doubt here; it is still early in a process that will take a year or two to fully play out. The company may find the right balance between its software-as-a-contact sport approach and being a more enlightened leader that could bring the open source and proprietary worlds together in a way that profits everyone.

How will the Oracle-Sun deal affect you?

Since the Monday morning announcement of the Oracle-Sun deal, we’ve already heard a lot about how the merger will affect Oracle: how it will help the software giant get ahead of IBM in a wide range of software and hardware markets, and help it better compete  against other archrivals in the enterprise Java arena, for example.

But what kind of effect will the deal actually have on the everyday life of IT professionals like you?

Site Editor Ed Scannell and I talked with Independent Oracle Users Group president Ian Abramson about the Oracle-Sun deal, including how the acquisition will affect the Oracle user community. Since the deal was just made this week, it’s difficult to accurately  predict its repercussions for users. But Abramson discussed some possible scenarios that the Oracle user community could see, including:

The Oracle-ization of Java: Abramson pointed out that while Oracle will gain greater control of Java, it may also take it one step further with an “Oracle-enhanced version”. He said that if Oracle repackaged and repurposed Java like it did with Linux, leaving the industry standard version alone, it could be beneficial to the Oracle community.

Lower maintenance costs: Abramson also said a reduction in support and maintenance fees is possible with the “consolidation of all these different support organizations, and Oracle’s ability to support a complete technology stack.” He thought this is something the user community is ultimately hoping for.

Other Oracle experts and analysts from around the Web have also weighed in on how Oracle’s latest acquisition will affect customers — especially with Java and MySQL. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s Leah Rosin examined the open source community’s reaction to the deal. While she found that many were worried about this being the end of MySQL, others more hopeful because of Oracle’s commitment to Linux.

Blogger Frederic Paul says that while the Oracle-Sun merger may result in more efficient technologies, it will also “reduce choice.” Still, he points out that nothing will change immediately and customers will have plenty of time to plan ahead.

And while many seem to think MySQL’s fate is sealed, many others - like analyst Michael Dortch– think Java should be safe. Analyst Dana Gardener agrees, pointing out that Oracle will keep Java to stay strong against its main Java competitor, IBM.

What was your reaction to the Oracle-Sun deal? How do you hope Oracle utilizes its new technologies? What are you most hopeful about? Worried about?