Sun Gazes Into The Oracle

Jan 16, 2008 – 23:13 by Ryan

Today Sun announced that they would acquire MySQL for one billlllion dollars. This is a surprising exit for the extremely popular open source database. It wasn’t too long ago that Red Hat acquired JBoss for $350M. It appears as if MySQL wasn’t able to fully monetize the consulting and enterprise support for the product. Sometimes, you just build too good of a product ;-)

If you look at the enterprise space, IBM, Oracle and Sun have a relatively full software stack. Additionally, IBM and now Sun have a mostly complete hardware stack as well. It seems natural that Oracle would’ve liked to acquire the product (to kill), but we can’t imagine the MySQL team would ever sell to them. However, if Sun buys MySQL and then Oracle turns around and purchases Sun in a year or so, then you’re going to see Oracle sitting a lot more securely in the enterprise space. When pitching large customers Oracle always has to partner with a hardware provider in order to compete against IBM. With Sun, Oracle could completely cut HP out of the picture and capture all the revenue soup-to-nuts. If Oracle has a full hardware and software stack, HP is left selling the printers.

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