Before I speak about where I’ve been lost in the past few days or I should rather say over a month. I should rather speak out more about one of the latest and hottest news in the silicon valley and the future of many Sun’s open source technologies like Java, MySQl, etc

Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced a deal to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) for $7.4 billion, a shock unification of software and hardware companies that emerged following failed talks for International Business Machines Corp. to buy Sun.

As the NY Times stated, Oracle and Sun are two heavyweights that have been partners for more than 20 years, even if Oracle has been distancing itself a bit from Sun’s server line in favor of competitors like HP and Dell lately because of Sun’s business decline. As a result of this deal, Oracle will now become a behemoth in both the software and the hardware market, and the implications this acquisition will have on the its closest rivals and the market in general will be noticeable for years to come.

According to Oracle the deal is valued $5.6 billion excluding cash & debt. As of Dec. 28, Sun had about $2.6 billion in cash and short-term investments and about $700 million in long-term debt.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, in a conference call described Java as “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.” As a result of the deal, he expects Oracle to be able to offer customers application programs, computers and data-storage hardware in a bundle that will be tuned to help solve their problems.

Oracle said that would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per-share contribution in the first year than the company had planned for the combined contributions of three of its biggest acquisitions–PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and BEA Systems.

“We have a track record of integrating acquisitions very quickly, and this will be no different,” said Safra Catz, one of two Oracle presidents beneath Mr. Ellison.

“The last thing you expected was a database-software company to buy a hardware customer base,” said Bruce Richardson, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. “It’s shocking.” He added that the move makes Oracle “a gorilla” in the market for computing infrastructure products. He questions whether Oracle will hold on to Sun’s hardware assets or try to sell them in a separate deal later.

But Ms. Catz said Oracle intends to make Sun’s hardware operations as a profitable operating unit inside Oracle.

What needs to be seen is that Oracle not only owns Java which it says as the most important software it has acquired but not to forget it also own the open source & widely popular database MySQL. As MySQl grows popular it disrupting Oracle’s high-end database business from below. Now what is Oracle planning as it takes over one of the biggest competitors of small scale market (MSSQL being the other big market competitors in large industry business). Oracle can now at least try to disrupt itself, or kill MYSQL. If something like this happens it would be a big shock for small scale industry & LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) developers and PHP driven websites which run on MySQL database.


Being a LAMP developer myself I am keeping my eyes on Oracle’s move. Hopefully we don’t see the conversion of Sun’s open source technologies into license branding or hiding source to developers end, which would be a big shock to the industry and the silicon valley principle of keeping up the open source technologies.