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Oracle Buys Sun
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 20, 2009 07:11 AM
from the there-can-be-only-one dept.
from the there-can-be-only-one dept.
bruunb writes "Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. 'We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,' said Oracle President Safra Catz."
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DOJ Gives Oracle Approval To Buy Sun 162 comments
k33l0r writes "The BBC is reporting that the US Justice Department has approved Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems. The acquisition gives Oracle control over (or a leading role in), among other things, Java, MySQL, (Open)Solaris, ZFS, OpenOffice, and the NetBeans IDE. 'The European Commission has still to rule on the deal, a step that will be required before it can close. That body has indicated it will issue an initial opinion on Sept. 3, according to the Wall Street Journal. It may OK the deal at that time or launch a four-month probe of it. ... The Justice Department ruling came earlier than expected, a possible response to Sun's declining revenues and precarious business position in a steep recession, as the required reviews proceeded.' We first discussed the deal back when it was announced in April."
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What about MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well well well. I can see this working well for Oracle - they use Java a great deal... and it should be good news for Sun's open source projects like Netbeans - which would, I think, be maintained under Oracle.
I guess it's a little sad to see Sun unable to continue by themselves, but the writing was on the wall and I think Oracle will keep all the Sun products working, but of course the big question is what does this mean for MySQL?
Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a time when Oracle was considering Netbeans [zdnet.com], but Oracle joined the Eclipse Foundation.
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
Might be interesting to see what happens. I think Netbeans will live on. Too many of sun's products rely on it.
What I'm more concerned with is the amount of contributions to PostgreSQL.
I still feel had they put more money/time into postgresql instead of buying MySQL, they wouldn't need to be bought.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Funny)
What the fuck is "netbeans"? Who uses this java nonsense anyway?
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Funny)
They are the seeds of the internet. You plant some and sprinkle them with bits. Eventually they grow into a huge series of tubes. How do you think the internet was created? With lots and lots of netbeans.
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Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Postgres is looking better than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
8.4 has citext. Or you can make an index with lower() on the appropriate columns.
IMO it's preferable for software to not assume that "Helped my uncle Jack off a horse." and "Helped my uncle jack off a horse." are the same thing.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle already has Linux (a re-branded RHEL) for it's *NIX platform.
My guess is they'll relegate either their Linux, or Solaris to the back (either way, I wouldn't be surprised if Solaris went completely open source, no non-open-source Solaris).
Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing", my guess is they'll move to Solaris, and their Linux distro will take a bow, since it's based off of someone elses work, that they've not yet acquired.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Since Oracle likes primarily using "their own thing", my guess is they'll move to Solaris, and their Linux distro will take a bow, since it's based off of someone elses work, that they've not yet acquired.
Solaris used to be the primary development environment and when Oracle switched to Linux the developers seemed to miss DTrace [intel.com].
In the past, Solaris was the best platform to deploy Oracle on. That may still be true today, even with all the support Oracle has put into Linux. Oracle has kept up with Solaris/Sparc but lagged releases for Solaris/x86. Hopefully that changes now.
As much as I like Linux, I still prefer Solaris, especially since Solaris 10.
Sun's hardware works best (faster doesn't mean better) with Solaris, so I can't see Oracle dropping Solaris. I agree that it wouldn't be surprising to see Oracle moving more towards Solaris.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is one of the biggest potential down sides of this deal. Oracle seek to control their products through using "their own thing"
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd expect to see closer integration with their DB. ZFS has some very nice transactional facilities. Oracle on other platforms tends to use its own filesystem drivers, but on Solaris they could use a ZVOL for the underlying transactional model easily and benefit from the lower-level parts of ZFS while using their own code for the data layout. They already ship a Linux distribution for running the DB, but I wouldn't be surprised if they start shipping Solaris instead (they can then tie their code closely to the kernel without having to open source it).
The most interesting question is what will happen to the UltraSPARC line. On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world. While Sun hardware is relatively expensive, even a top spec T2 box is cheap compared to the software cost of a typical Oracle install and so I wouldn't be surprised if the T3 is tweaked even more heavily for Oracle workloads. Being able to sell a complete vertical solution, with their own CPU, OS, and DB system is probably quite appealing to Oracle.
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You're playing an incomplete game! (Score:5, Funny)
On paper, Rock
Why won't anyone play with scissors? :(
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eclipse is open-source.
So is Netbeans.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Informative)
Sun doesn't accept contributions to Netbeans itself citing that their development pace is too fast
Last time I checked, open source just means that the source is available. There's no requirement that they accept external contributions. If you want to contribute, fork it and go from there.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have many co-workers that use Eclipse everyday, but that never got hold of point of the joke in the name.
"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted by something else. It makes IBM's reasons for funding Eclipse dead obvious. Turn one of your competitor's product niche into a commodity.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Netbeans is much faster and elegant than JDev. Netbeans is much like another Eclipse, maybe better...
In the long run, FOSS converges to one winner, challenged by many (much smaller) creatures. Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets. Try to compete with Apache. Try to build a new OpenOffice (though one that had a major corp backing). I expect these IDE's to converge in one way or other to a single winner, and some small hang-on-tight communities fervor's for their champ remaining intact.
As for MySQL, the Oracle benefactors will say: do not worry, my dear people, we will keep it with true love, and gradually let it become deprecatingly obsolete.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.
I don't know what that is, though...
Remember: Larry hates Bill. Bill earns a lot of $$ from MS Office. This may result in more funding for OoO.
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Re:What about MySQL? (Score:5, Funny)
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New Solaris bit-by-bit licensing terms (Score:5, Funny)
1s - free
0s - $10 per 0, minimum 100,000 0s
Re:New Solaris bit-by-bit licensing terms (Score:5, Funny)
per processor core, multiplied by the number of megabytes of RAM installed in your system.
Oh, pardon me, this isn't a production system, but is a development workstation? Allow me to refer you to the above licensing fee schedule. Thank you for choosing Oracle!
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Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a big surprise.
Wonder if Solaris will become their main development platform again.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually. I think it might well go the other way. That Oracle decided to fork/clone Red Hat shows one thing - Oracle WANTS to have an OS.
Now they have one.
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Why would they use Solaris? Even Sun hardly seemed to use it that much ;o)
When you say stupid things, you might want to consider posting anonymously next time :)
Anyway....
When IBM was considering buying Sun, Forbes put out a video on Sun's legacy [forbes.com] which some of you might find interesting.
It's sad to see Sun go down, but I'm optimistic about the merger with Oracle.
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Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Re:Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
Application server? Java development environment? Control of the Java language? UI Technology? Hardware?
Everyone seems to be missing the big picture: Oracle's goal is to offer you a fully supported "stack" from database to application server to hardware and everything in between. All the development tools, technologies, languages, etc. So they can lock you in and offer you the full range of support, no handing you off to so and so because it's not a database problem anymore. Would you pay a premium for that? That's how you make money. And now, they have filled a lot of those gaps and have absorbed some great teams to make that dream a reality. Or so they believe. We'll see how this turns out.
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Re:Wow. Just Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
Its highly unlikely Oracle will maintain Sun's hardware aspect of the business. Sun already has put SPARC into legacy mode. Oracle will probably keep or sell off the hardware products that can sustain itself. It will probably maintain the legacy server stuff, to keep its high-end ticket customers who buy Sun for high-availability systems.
An accepted tactic to grow a customer base is to buyout another company's customer base. Its usually considered to be a cheaper route than investing in taking away a competitor's customer base. This is probably the reason Oracle went for Sun. Oracle has become more services/consultant oriented. It can't really break into IBM's territory, partly because of IBM's hardware components for "complete solutions" or enterprise market. This allows Oracle to grab all the customers IBM hasn't already taken away.
The bigger question is what Oracle plans for Sun's software products, like Solaris, MYSQL, and Java.
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Sparc into legacy mode? (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't get that impression last time I attended one of their seminars a few weeks ago.
The multicore stuff Sun is doing is miles ahead og anything anybody else is doing,. I hope Oracle do not axe that.
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Well, crap. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is 8am too early to start drinking?
I am deeply disappointed by this turn of events.
IBM would have been a much better buyer, if the deal had to be done.
Oracle? Bleah!
Well, I'll bet the suits at IBM are kicking themselves hard, now that Oracle has control of Java.
Re:Well, crap. (Score:5, Funny)
Is 8am too early to start drinking?
No.
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Re:Well, crap. (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, because it's 5pm somewhere.
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Re:Well, crap. (Score:5, Funny)
Is 8am too early to start drinking?
That really depends upon your timezone and whether or not you've been to bed yet.
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I'm quite sure that IBM hates itself now (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle+Sun has the power to seriously harm IBM. IBMs big plus was the combination of good hardware + OS + DB + consultants.
Oracle + Sun can now deliver exactly the same.
bye egghat
Yes, very stupid move on IBM's part (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle suddenly has a great operating system, great server hardware, a popular database, and the de facto language of server-side business logic (other than COBOL.)
And IBM has built so much of its business on Java.
IBM should have just opened the piggy bank and it would have saved itself the world of hurt it now has in store.
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Should I feed the troll? (Score:5, Informative)
Source IDC 2008:
market share:
"Unix, mid-to-high-end servers ($17.2 billion in 2008)
IBM 37.2 pct
Sun 28.1 pct
HP 26.5 pct
"
Don't give a flying fig about Suns servers?
IIRC Solaris still has the highest market share among proprietary Unixes. And AIX ist only third after HP-UX.
And if you think about Oracle as a database company you've kind of missed the last 8 years or so. They've bought a lot of stuff and are number two behind SAP.
"IBM provides Java and Java products. "
Well I guess Sun does that too.
Regarding virtualization: XVM Server [sun.com]
Should be enough to keep the troll busy ;-)
Bye egghat
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Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun = Poorly run company with great products
Oracle = Masterfully run company with shitty products
I wonder how that DNA is going to come together...
Oracle was wanting its own OS (Score:5, Interesting)
The internal announcement (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone with morbid curiosity:
From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)
Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Jonathan
Facinating combination (Score:5, Interesting)
What we have here on one hand is Oracle, a company that is incredibly well run, but with products that don't cover a complete spectrum, and Sun, a so-so run company with a wide range of product lines. This can go two ways, Suns platform quality goes down while Oracles management goes down with it, *or*, and this is the scenario I hope for, Oracle cleans out the dead wood in Sun management, and adopts the Sun technology in force. I've worked on Oracle machines, and Sun machines. I've also delt with both companies sales forces. If the synergy can be hammered out, this can really shake up the business world.
One suggestion tho, keep both names. Use Sun for the hardware, Oracle for the software.
New hardware standard. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how long it will take Oracle to pretty much give the middle finger to HP and Dell hardware partnerships in favor of the soon-to-be-released OracleFire "product-in-the-box" line...
Java 8 Preview (Score:5, Funny)
Java 8 will replace String with String2, which will treat empty string and null the same.
Re:Java 8 Preview (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, anyone who has taken a close look at what Oracle has done to Java with JDeveloper and Oracle AS knows that this will not be good for Java. Oracle is famous for not implementing standard API calls and instead providing proprietary methods and super classes to implement basic functionality (JDBC BLOBs, web services, etc.) Vendor lock-in is one thing, but their ideas and designs are just ugly and unwieldy.
They had started to play nice with EJB3 and TopLink, but now they have absolutely no reason to keep doing so. They now have much more weight in the JCP process (if the JCP even continues to exist) and they can now push out better ideas from competitors. I'm very apprehensive about the future of Java.
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Good-bye MySQL (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully, I have recently switched myself (and my clients) over to Postgresql.
It was a sad day when Oracle got the rights to the InnoDB engine, but at least MySQL itself was in the hands of Sun.
With Oracle now owning all the rights to what is probably the biggest free competitor, I think the open source world shouldn't put much stock or investment into MySQL.
I've been quite impressed with the performance and straight-forwardness of PostGres, and will continue to happily use it. I was alawys keeping MySQL in the back of my mind, to try out now and then, but with this announcement, I doubt it'll be worthwhile.
Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?
Aside from that, I find this all very sad. Sun was one of the Unix innvators from the earliest days. Even when they grow large, they still seemed like a "cool company." Healey used to personally answer emails I would send him. Oracle seems to be the antithesis of this; major, corporate, gouging, monster... One can only hope that some of Sun's culture and products will survive.
Arrogance is blinding you (Score:5, Informative)
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Scared after seeing what happened to Berkeley DB (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL is in a very different niche than Oracle.
I'd think MySQL is one of the reasons Oracle bought Sun. Whatever its failings, MySQL is the "default" choice for most new (small) deployments (I mean, to the extent there's the LAMP acronym for it), the ones that are too small for Oracle to care about.
Now that Oracle has it, they're in a position to "upsell" them once they get far enough. They now control both the high end AND the low end ("... the horizontal and the vertical..."). I'd expect an upper limit to the effort put into scaling MySQL up ("we already have a high-end DB, why waste the effort?"), but I don't see them abandoning it.
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Re:Java is safe, mysql is safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? From what I've seen, the recent UltraSPARCs (T2, and possibly the Rock too) have the best performance-per-watt when running parallel workloads with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Oracle workloads are parallel, with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Shipping Oracle appliances on T2 chips means that they aren't having to pay another company a share of their profits for their CPU, and continuing to sell them to other people helps them offset more of the R&D costs.
Oh, and Sun aren't the only company making SPARC chips. Some of the ones Sun has been selling for the past few years have been rebranded Fujitsu SPARC64s and there are a few companies selling SPARC32 (v8) systems for the embedded market, although they are less common than ARM and PowerPC.
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Niagara should have a future (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Site already slashdotted ... (Score:5, Funny)
They've switch to Solaris already???
(ducks and runs for cover :)
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Re:SPARC going out...? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the interesting question is, does Oracle care about SPARC?
The majority of Sun's $13billion in revenues comes from hardware.
The majority of their hardware comes from Sparc.
Why would you buy a company for billions of dollars and ditch it's most popular product?
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Re:I just hope... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey! Did that guy just use "synergies" in a non-ironic fashion? Get him!
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