Dana Gardner

Oracle Acquisition of Sun Makes Perfect Sense

Right, so sell the hardware, use Solaris and Java and sunset the Sun middleware. Take customers, sell support. But you overlook getting to a cloud power position faster because of Sun's technology. Oracle can get up and running on cloud much faster now, and that's important.


On Apr 20 02:20 PM Mafeking wrote:

> Sun has three broad business areas: Hardware - servers and chips,
> software - Java and associated frameworks and Services - a reasonable
> professional services outfit.
>
> Oracle can improve the efficiency and profitability of the Sun services
> organization and move their (Oracles) more aggressive and costly
> professional services people into that space. There is money to
> be made in this area.
>
> But the other two areas are more problematic.
>
> In hardware Sun is losing market share to the increasing power of
> the mulit-processor Intel and AMD chip sets. Certainly the Sun Sparc
> and n-way architecture has greater performance, but this performance
> is only required in very demanding areas. Oracle has bought a declining
> business in this area that is likely to go head to head with HP's
> servers (not cooperate with HP). I am not sure Gardner is correct
> in his assessment here.
>
> Sun's software offerings are another story. Sun invented (Gosling,
> et. al.) Java, Java libraries and Java frameworks that created almost
> a revolution in the software industry by improving software portability
> and robustness. But has never been able to truly monetize the Java
> story. I suspect the Sun software unit is not profitable. The forces
> of Open Source Java have just been too strong.
>
> So Sun's software business is also a story of declining profits.
>
>
> In the final analysis I think Ellison has bought Sun for their customer
> base and the synergies and penetration that Oracle can achieve into
> the Sun accounts and customers. Oracle is not going to make a lot
> of profit from Sun's hardware and software.
>