Jan 17

Musings on Oracle/BEA, Sun/MySQL   Posted by sharps, tagged with bea mysql oracle

Having had 24 hours to digest yesterday's news (OK, in the case of Oracle/BEA - more like 4 years) here are some thoughts.

"Open Source" companies (ie. a commercial organizations that derive profit directly from supporting Open Source) - are likely worth more today than they were yesterday because the MySQL acquisition  has set a new valuation record for an Open Source acquisition. I think the previous record was Citrix's acquisition of XenSource (for $500M). With VC investment approaching year 2000 levels - I wonder if we'll see a rush to start and invest in "Open Source" companies ?

Clearly Enterprise adoption of Open Source software will continue unabated - I actually don't think there's really much resistance anyway so I don't think this move will necessarily accelerate it.  

Oracle have a couple of choices wrt their middleware platform - they either quickly remove redundancy and shit-can their current portfolio which is generally regarded as inferior to BEA's and has much lower adoption or they continue with the two platforms. My money is on the former - their Fusion project is fundamentally about aligning all their applications to use a common set of services based on a single platform (ie. removing redundancy). I think there's little risk here - as far as I'm aware - Oracle Middleware customers are typically Oracle shops - and Oracle can control the 'migration' without too much churn. In some cases - customers will use this decision point to migrate to a lower price Java EE-based alternative (eg. GlassFish, RedHat / JBoss) or move to some other technology / framework (.NET, RoR, etc.). If Oracle don't move quickly and decisively to make it clear which middleware platform they're taking forward then the churn will be much more significant (as will the competition's gain). There's nothing like indecision and confusion to drive customers away.

My feeling is that there won't be a significant opportunity for the competition here (more's the pity) - I think Oracle are too well-practiced at post-acquisition integration to screw up to the degree required to drive customers away. But still, shit happens so we'll just have to see how things pan out.

The big question is how the MySQL acquisition changes the Sun / Oracle relationship. Notwithstanding a knee-jerk reaction from Larry Ellison - I can't imagine much changing. I don't think anyone is expecting a mass migration from Oracle to MySQL though I'm certain MySQL's adoption will accelerate. These kind of shifts happen at glacial rates and Oracle have no doubt been thinking about commoditization in this space for a couple of decades. They've clearly drastically changed their revenue mix in the last 10 years. So, while I'm sure Oracle's RDBMS revenue is *huge* - it's no longer their only revenue stream.