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HOME >> ZEICHICK'S TAKE

Zeichick's Take: Driving a Wedge Between Sun and Oracle

By Alan Zeichick

January 17, 2008 — Yesterday’s news: Oracle is eating BEA, while Sun is chomping up MySQL.

The bigger news story is that Oracle, thwarted last October, finally nabbed BEA Systems. The $7.2 billion deal (it looks like $8.5 billion, but I've subtracted on paper, taking into account BEA's cash reserves) is still a hefty chunk of change, even by Oracle's standards. Still, did anyone doubt that it would happen?

For most of us, this huge acquisition won't make much difference at all. While some BEA products might be subordinated to their Oracle counterparts, Oracle should be a good shepherd of BEA’s technology and customers. If anything, Oracle’s deep pockets might push some of BEA’s many initiatives harder.

What about Sun’s purchase of MySQL for about US$1 billion? That might be cause for worry for advocates of the LAMP stack. LAMP, of course, is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl – and is relied upon by both enterprise and commercial developers who want to avoid the high licensing costs of Oracle DB, DB2 or SQL Server.

Many of the world's biggest Web applications, using lots of things at Google, Facebook and others, are dependent on MySQL. In many ways, MySQL was the strongest pillar of the LAMP stack.

The question is, how well will MySQL fare in Sun’s hands? While Sun is focused on open source software, it likes to go its own way. Certainly, MySQL will see investment, as well as tighter integration with Java, Solaris and NetBeans. When MySQL stops being an independent software maker, integration with Linux, or with competing platforms, will take a back seat. After all, Sun's going to have to find a way to make money from MySQL in order to justify the investment.

Sun's move is bound to drive a wedge between Sun and Oracle. Traditionally allies, they've gotten along so well largely because Sun didn't have an enterprise database of its own.

Because the other two databases didn't like Sun (because IBM competed with Sun's hardware, and Microsoft competed with everything at Sun), Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy found many great reasons to play well together. That partnership paid off for many, many years.

But that was long ago, and clearly Jonathan Schwartz sees things differently.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.

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