A Legacy Ends

After a long legacy and several acquisition rumors, Sun was finally taken over by Oracle.

On April 20th 2009, Oracle (ORCL) has official announced that it would purchase Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA) for $7.4 billion in cash ($9.50 a share). After 27 years of independent services, Sun is now a part of Oracle.

Oracle had bought 50 companies since 2005 spending $40 billion. Now Sun is one of them.

Well, what Oracle saw in Sun? - The biggest products of Sun which attracted all the big fish are undoubtedly Java and Solaris.

Java

• "Java is the single most important software asset we have ever acquired", this bold statement by a chief executive of Oracle says it all
• Java runs on 800 million PCs and 2.1 billion mobile phones, these are not small figures
• Java is used in several of the world’s business software and is also a major component in Oracles product arsenal
• Java is the key of Oracles middleware solutions product line - Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Oracle Forms and Reports are another major component of Oracle Application Server which relies heavily on Java Containers
• This acquisition would give Oracle the stronghold of Java, allowing it to sync its products with Java
• Also mobile vendors like Nokia pay royalties to license the software
• However even with all this, Java was not even 1% of Sun’s 2008 revenue. This might be a major area of focus for Oracle strategic business plans

Solaris

• Solaris is one of the most popular operating system in domains like Finance and Telecom
• Oracle plans to sell the Solaris operating system and the servers of Sun along with its market-leading database software to its consumers

MySQL

• In addition to Java and Solaris, Oracle also gains the free MySQL database
• MySQL has been a strong competitor to the Oracle database, especially in the small market ventures
• With this acquisition Oracle hopes to push MySQL to smaller companies and give a stiff competition to Microsoft’s SQL Server
• But MySQL doesn’t look like becoming a high priority product for Oracle
• MySQL will be another addition to the database chain of Oracle - Oracle database, TimesTen, Berkeley DB and the storage engine InnoDB

The Hardware Market

• Putting aside the software products of Sun, Oracle will also get a hold of the hardware sector of Sun, including the Sun rays, Sun blades, etc.
• Though hardware is the biggest area of revenue for Sun, Oracle has little experience in this field

One company that has taken aback with this deal is IBM, IBM relies heavily on Java. Will Oracle use the acquisition to make it difficult for the Big Blue to develop software using Java? - This is something that we need to wait and watch.

However this deal has still a lot of buzz to make and several questions that will arise and will be answered -

• Will Java become a complete commercial entity?
• Will MySQL be overshadowed?
• How will Oracle look at Open Source?
• What about the other big products of Sun - NetBeans, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, etc.
• What about the not so well-known products of Sun - Project Darkstar, Project wonderland, etc.
• What will happen to the redundant products of Oracle and Sun - NetBeans (JDeveloper), Oracle Weblogic (GlassFish), JVM (JRockit), IDM and JCAPS (Oracle Fusion Middleware) and the others

And the most important question of all

• What will happen to the Sun Campus Ambassador Program? :)

Well these are question which can be answered only by time.