Everyone in the silicon valley is talking about it. Someone is excited more over others. However, this is not a shock or surprise to anyone. Sooner or the later this has to happen. Oracle has been VERY STRONG player in the middle-ware with its acquisition marathon, it built “near to complete” business vertical empire. Oracle has a complete stack of the enterprise software and is a REAL “Information Company”.
With the Oracle agreeing to buy Sun, there are plethora of possibilities for Synergy. Many view Oracle as an enterprise software company and till now all the databases, products are tuned to number of servers such as Sun Solaris, Linux, HP and Windows. With this acquisition, there would be greater and tighter integration along with performance tuning for the Oracle products on Solaris OS + Sun hardware. This will also launch Oracle in the hardware race with the IBM and HP. Oh ya… Cisco has just started, but now Oracle is already in it (with this acquisition).
Oracle now will be able to steer the JCP along with IBM and other major players. Java would see a major boost and a new direction with focus on the Enterprise Software. I am specially interested to see if there would be more developments (and innovation) in JVM and other languages based on it such as JRuby, Scala, etc…
Sun has been very keen in technology innovation and result is the full stack of Web Services, JVM, JRE, GlassFish, JavaFX and last but not the least NetBeans. Of course Sun is one company that entered into the IDE market in the earlier stages but could not make a great IDE out of NetBeans when compared to Eclipse. Along with JDeveloper, Oracle contributed great plugins to Eclipse and has been a long term supporter of Eclipse. This is one area, i am curious to see what would happen to 3 IDEs (JDeveloper, Eclipse, NetBeans).
The next big thing Oracle will definitely gain in my perspective is Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is relatively new and has a great potential to be the next wave in the Infrastructure + Software + Internet technology. With the stack of its enterprise products + cloud computing Oracle and Sun could both have a great synergy in this area.
Not sure what would happen to MySQL database. This is a free, open source database also available in Enterprise flavor. The good thing about the MySQL is that is has a small eco system fo developers and tool vendors. Unlike Oracle, MySQL is targeted to wards small/medium scale applications and enterprises.
Finally, Oracle acquiring Sun is definitely good for struggling Sun. Oracle is very good at the business and it has a very good sales team. This, combined with the Sun’s technology would be a good news for the customers. It is too early to predict what would happen to the other technologies at Sun. But, customers are sure going to benefit from this acquisition.
Disclaimer : This is my personal opinion ONLY. None of these ideas or statements correspond, reflect or transform to any of my current or previous employers.