Oracle

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.

Red Hat-EnterpriseDB deal could affect Oracle’s open source fortunes

With Red Hat making a $19 million investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week, competition in the open source database market figures to get a little more interesting. While the European Commission (EC) and Oracle grapple over whether it is in the best interest of the market for the latter to take ownership of MySQL, Red Hat is clearly not waiting for that decision to make its move.

Red Hat officials hardly drew a detailed product roadmap for what they might do with Enterprise DB’s Postgres-based database (like putting together a software stack with Enterprise Linux, JBoss and KVM to go after Oracle at the low end perhaps) at this week’s announcement.  More importantly, Red Hat’s investment signals its belief that maybe the open source database market could be the next big opportunity in software.

A nice byproduct of the Red Hat-EnterpriseDB deal is if the EC does finally write off on the Oracle-MySQL deal, Oracle would have a legitimate competitor that could prevent it from completely dominating the open source database market. Not that the Red Hat-EnterpriseDB partnership would cause a mass migration away from MySQL either.

For now, officials from both companies see a good fit going forward. Enterprise DB has established itself as one of the leading supporters of PostgresSQL database, announcing in 2005 it planned to make proprietary products based on the product. Red Hat is hardly unfamiliar with Postgres as it has bundled the product with every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for some time. Red Hat is also moving its Linux-based Network Satellite to PostgresSQL and away from Oracle.

Each company also shares the same view on how to sell its products. “EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model.  Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial,” said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat said earlier this week.

And if both companies eventually do put together a software stack that takes on Oracle, both Red Hat and EnterpriseDB, particularly the latter, would benefit from Red Hat’s larger sales organization and network of resellers.

If the EC forces Oracle to sell off MySQL in order for the Sun acquisition to be approved, the Red Hat-Enterprise DB deal could take on even larger significance.  Any third party that MySQL ends up in the hands of almost assuredly would be less powerful and influential than Oracle (I just can’t see IBM, Microsoft or SAP jumping in here because of either a lack of strategic interest or government intervention), meaning the newly formed partnership would have a better chance to grab market share.

If the EC rules against Oracle holding on to MySQL, the loser here could be Oracle. Redwood Shores would lose a golden opportunity to own one of the premiere products in the open source market - a market that figures to grow bigger not smaller over the next few years - as well as have its proprietary database business come under pressure from Red Hat and the new owners of MySQL.

‘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.

Ellison hopes the EU won’t Sunset his hardware business

Speaking at a dinner hosted by a non-profit group in San Jose last night, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison confirmed what we wrote earlier this month: The European Union’s investigation into the Oracle-Sun deal could slowly kill Sun’s competitive chances.

Well, maybe not so slowly. Ellison said Sun is losing some $100 million a month. This news comes less than a month after Sun reported a loss of $147 million for the August quarter.  Things are clearly getting worse.

Interviewed on stage, perhaps fittingly, by ex-Sun executive Ed Zander, Ellison said the longer the EU’s approval process takes, “the more money Sun is going to lose, and that’s not good for anybody. We want to get this (acquisition) done to save as many jobs as we can.”

Ellison did express confidence the EU will approve the deal, but obviously would like to see that approval way before the January 19, 2010 deadline. If indeed it takes that long, Oracle’s integrated hardware-software strategies will have to come from way back in the pack to catch IBM and Hewlett-Packard, both of whom have been successfully marauding Sun’s user base.

Nonetheless, Ellison said he is still intent on competing hard against IBM and HP, adding he has “no interest in the hardware business,” per se but has a “deep interest in the systems business.” This means Oracle will focus on very high performance systems, such as the Exadata 2 system it jointly rolled out with Sun last week, and not commodity level boxes.

Continuing on his roll, Ellison said he had no plans to sell off Sun’s popular open source database, MySQL, despite some of the reservations expressed by the EU. Earlier this month EU officials said Oracle having control over the leading proprietary database and the leading open source database could end up significantly limiting users’ choices in the database market.

Ellison shot back last night saying Oracle’s flagship database doesn’t compete with MySQL, asserting each product is sold to very different users. Oracle’s product is aimed at large corporations for mission critical applications while MySQL is for programmers who can download it for free and generally use it for Web-based applications. It is good to see Larry take a swing back at the EU for such lunacy.

And in another case of Larry being Larry, he couldn’t help himself from taking another swing at cloud computing. I thought he got past this, but he still hasn’t had his fill. Asked what sort of threat cloud computing presented to Oracle’s business, Ellison said there was nothing new about the idea, “that is was just water vapor, just a computer connected to a network.”

Come on now Larry, we know its semantics but look at what your competitors can do with just the right words and a huge marketing campaign.

In a somewhat surprising piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, Ellison said they should think about pouring their money and energies into biotech and not IT. So one of the richest guys in the world, who made his fortune from IT, doesn’t think it offers the next generation any growth opportunities?

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 users take the bailout?

While there hasn’t been a loud outcry from users about Oracle’s recent price hikes on selected database modules, by taking such action during such difficult times Redwood Shores did nothing to endear themselves either.

There hasn’t been a lot of hollering about the price hikes, of course, because many corporate accounts are locked into long term software licensing agreements they can do little about until the agreements expire. And the same for maintenance agreements which go hand in hand with the software agreements.

Still, it is perplexing why in the midst of The Great Recession Oracle would raise prices by thousands of dollars on some products when some of its best customers are counting pennies as well as the minutes until this crisis eases.

It is true that the elevated prices represent merely a starting point in negotiations between Oracle and it customers. There is nothing stopping Oracle from dropping those prices in behind closed doors talks, but why poke the rattlesnake with a stick?

But it is moments like this where some frustrated users leave open that door to exploring opportunities to lower cost options, even if it is only for one-off departmental solutions.

This week, a relatively small open source database make, Enterprise DB may have given some frustrated users reason to keep that door to alternatives open.

With some clever marketing the company announced its Oracle Migration Assessment Program — which the company with a wry smile calls the Oracle Bailout Program - is designed as an enticement to attract users away from Oracle’s database lineup and sky high licensing fees, and over to the decidedly less expensive Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

“Oracle’s price hikes might be good news for those on Wall Street, but they’re terrible news for IT departments trying to function in the worst economy since the Great Depression,” said Ed Boyajian, the president and CEO of EnterpriseDB. True enough.

Admittedly however the program sounds a bit gimmicky, EnterpriseDB dreamed it up in direct reaction to the July 1 price increases. And the company is not releasing names of those who are interested in migrating away from Oracle. But the company’s timing could be just about right. So it is safe to say there isn’t a land rush toward the program.

The “bailout” essentially helps enterprise customers migrate any and all applications running on top of Oracle databases to the Postgres product, which is an open source based database with a built in Oracle compatibility layer. EnterpriseDB officials said they are guaranteeing no disruptions to an IT shop’s operation during a migration, truly a brave statement.

Enterprise officials may be going too far in saying the price hikes to the performance and tuning packs and other database options are indicative of what they will do with their newly acquired open-source bauble, MySQL. Only the good Lord and Larry Ellison know what they will do with MySQL, and I am betting the former is even a bit in the dark.

But if EnterpriseDB and other open source comrades can come up with some creative approaches that make financial sense, they could apply pressure on Oracle to lower pricing on its proprietary products and even force them to make a more obvious commitment to open source.

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.

How will Oracle do when the chips are down?

The good thing about Sun canceling development of its 16-core Rock processor means Oracle now has one less set of multi-core servers to fret over with its cores vs. processor licensing policy. The bad news is the new Oracle, hoping to compete against the likes of IBM and Hewlett-Packard from chips to business process software will come to battle with a few less bullets.

I am only half kidding, of course, about the good news part. For better or worse (worse many users say) Oracle doesn’t fret much over whether it should license servers by the processor core or by the box. It unflinchingly continues to license by the number of cores, which could prove an expensive proposition for some buyers.

The bad news I may not be kidding about so much. With Sun kicking its five-year old Rock project to the curb, Oracle can’t make the next leap in the game of performance leapfrog it plays with chip rivals IBM and Intel.

In fact, Sun has failed to leap a couple of times having canceled its UltraSparc-V chip project earlier this decade because it essentially ran out of development funds. The company rushed out its UltraSparc-IV chip as a stop-gap product that didn’t do much. And when Sun was skipping a leap, a couple of other times it was very slow to leap, being months even years late in delivering a new chip.

Sun officials have talked consistently the past few years about the Rock being a game changer. The chip was designed to achieve a much higher per-thread and floating point performance, along with greater Symmetrical Multi-Processing capabilities than its Niagra family of chips.

Rock, which was to anchor the company’s Supernova line of servers, was supposed to really shine when it came to handling high-end data facing workloads including database servers. Just guessing here, but I think a machine delivering great database performance would be important to Oracle.

With Rock out of the game Sun will continue to use Fujitsu processors, which will be fine, but hardly represents the game changer the company was hoping for. One positive aspect to all this is that Sun’s research and development costs just got significantly lower. This won’t make Larry Ellison unhappy as he tries to complete the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun.

But once again Sun has opened the door wide open for a number of competitors to rush through, most notably IBM. With one less competitor at the high end, IBM figures to rip away more server market share from Sun over the short term. Some speculated over the last day or so that Oracle might start to emphasize the next gen Niagra III Sparc chips, as well as pushing Solaris on x64 servers fueled by Intel’s upcoming Nehalem EX servers.

Sun has been relying on chips from Fujitsu for its larger servers while it waited for the Rock development to be finished. Now it is likely to just continue using Fujitsu chips, which should lower research and development costs.

But what does the lack of a “game-changing” chip like Rock do to Oracle’s plans to sell vertically integrated hardware-software stacks (as has been rumored) ala its Exadata Database Machine? It could hurt its newly acquired hardware business for sure, but perhaps more importantly hold back its flagship database business at the high end in some key markets, along with other proprietary and open source software offerings.

We knew Oracle was buying some damaged goods with its acquisition of Sun, but I am not sure if Redwood Shores was assuming its chip business might be this damaged.