SQL Power CEO on Oracle's Acquisition of Sun

SQL Power CEO Sam Selim
on Oracle's Acquisition of Sun

April 22, 2009

Quite possibly the most strategically brilliant IT move in more than 20 years!

Many moons ago (back in the mid 1980's), I used to work for Oracle Corporation, and although much has changed in this Billion-dollar conglomerate over the years, at least one thing stayed the same - CEO and founder Larry Ellison - the man is strategically brilliant!

Back in the 1980's Larry Ellison made sure that all of Oracle's products were functionally identical on all operating system platforms including Windows, Vax VMS and Unix. In order to penetrate larger accounts, he offered the PC version of Oracle RDBMS and all the 4th GL tools for $299 for those that wanted to dabble with Relational Databases and with 4GL productivity tools.

This removed the barriers to entry and allowed all IT groups from small to large organizations to experience his revolutionary software and to build fully functional OLTP applications on the Oracle platform. Soon companies wanted to deploy these prototypes and POC(s) in production and had to roll them out to larger VMS and Unix production environments, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same functionality and for the right to run them on these larger platforms.

This brilliant marketing move significantly grew Oracle's RDBMS market share and allowed Oracle to double their revenue for 13 straight quarters between 1987 and 1990... growing this once basement startup into one of the largest software companies in the world.

Well a lot has happened between 1985 and 2009: a couple of recessions, a dot com bust, many key acquisitions (incl. Siebel, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Hyperion, etc.) and still Oracle is left standing as one of the largest software players in the world.

Tired of playing with his Ferrari(s), boats and other toys... Larry Ellison is close to pulling off the biggest coup in the last 20 years by acquiring Sun for a bargain basement price of approx. 5.6 Billion and in one swift move positioning Oracle as:

• The premiere Open Source player with MySQL
• The owner of the premiere development language in the world (Java)
• One of the premiere high-end Hardware providers in the world
• a Key OS player with Solaris
• A Key Microsoft competitor with Java, a low cost RDBMS, and Open Office
• a Key IBM Competitor with a full range of applications, RDBMS(s), services, and HW
• a one-stop shop for all your Application, RDBMS, Hardware and Development needs

Those that wrote off Oracle in the past and have refused to do business with them and decommissioned their RDBMS(s) now find themselves in bed with Oracle once again with MySQL, Java and Sun boxes.

Oracle is now positioned to fully integrate and configure their Applications, RDBMS, OS and Hardware, offering the ultimate in application appliances and providing future customers with hassle-free pre-configured appliances that will just work.

But will they? So many questions remain to be answered...

• Will Oracle invest in and promote MySQL as the Open Source RDBMS of choice?
• Will Oracle invest in and promote Open Office as the MS Office alternative?
• Will Oracle expand their Consulting division and take on IBM head to head?
• Will they appeal to the anti-evil Free Software community?
• What will they do with the Sun Hardware?
• What will they do with Java?

If history has taught us anything, it's that Larry Ellison will make the most of this acquisition and will take on the likes of IBM, Microsoft and SAP and will win... once again living up to his semi-evil motto "It is not sufficient that we succeed, everyone else must fail!"

Sam Selim
CEO of SQL Power Group