Yesterday, Marketwatch posted an interesting piece on the ongoing drama in Oracle’s bid to acquire Sun. Based on data from regulatory filings, Oracle was one of the three bidders. IBM was also in the mix, while the identity of the third is believed to be HP, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Dell.
Despite Larry’s proclamation of interest in Sun servers and the SPARC chipset, his initial plan was threefold: make a minority investment, acquire some of Sun’s software assets, and form “certain strategic relationships.” Based on Marketwatch and other news reports, it appears that Oracle’s first thrust occurred once word leaked out about IBM’s intentions.
On another note, this morning Oracle announced plans to buy Virtual Iron, a Lowell-MA provider of virtualization software. Terms were not disclosed. Virtual Iron has 2,000 customers spread across a wide array of industries.
What do you think? Once the Sun deal closes, what does Oracle do with Sun’s hardware and SPARC? Will the Virtual Iron buy put more pressure on VMware?
Bruce, I personally believe they are going to retain Sun's hardware considering Oracle's projected revenue after Sun's acquisition in next 2 years and approximately 40% of Sun's revenues come from Maintenance
In one of my earlier postings http://www.infosysblogs.com/oracle/2009/05/oracle_vertical_integration_a_1.html#more , I discussed about the increasingly demand to move towards cloud computing and virtualization, which needs the underlying resources behind the cloud to be tightly coupled. With Sun's acquisition, along with the control over open source Java, and Solaris, it also gives Oracle the ownership of complete stack. Also acquisition of Virtual Iron is of part of moving towards cloud computing and virtualization and the future strategy to offer the overall stack as service in a more user friendly mode- utility services(time based or usage based)
Also the boundaries are increasingly getting blurred with different players(IBM, HP, CISCO etc) having a dominant position on a particular slice of the stack; trying to get into each other's space. You would have read about John Chamber's latest interview which talks about expanding fast into 30 markets and also for launching competing servers- very much to disappointment of partners like IBM and HP who sell lot of Cisco's gears.
What do you think? are there other major acquisition in line with the purpose of getting a share of the pie dominated by other player?
Posted by: Amandeep Singh Syali | May 18, 2009 at 02:01 AM