But rivals question Oracles' motives

The Australian ^ | 4.27.09 | Mahesh Sharma

[libh8er]

LAST week's audacious $US7.4 billion ($10.2 billion) play by Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems has drawn comparisons with General Motors' moves in the 1950s to consolidate the US car industry.

Oracle has touted the bid as a game changer that will help establish it as the first company to sell software and hardware products end-to-end.

Rivals are sceptical of the rhetoric and believe the real motive is to kill off Sun's competing software products, which they say has been a theme of Oracle's buying spree, which has reportedly cost $US34.5 billion since 2005.

If approved, Oracle will acquire Sun's global server production business and massive customer footprint as well as Sun's widely used software technology, which includes the Java platform and Solaris open-source operating system -- a competitor to Microsoft's Windows.

The hardware business will pit Oracle against long-time technology partners IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Oracle's software applications, which underpin a wide range of technology functions at large corporations around the world, operate traditionally on hardware technology and servers sold by IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

[Hardastarboard]

Oracle has touted the bid as a game changer that will help establish it as the first company to sell software and hardware products end-to-end.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Has Oracle ever heard of IBM? I realize that in the software industry that marketing is all, that buzzwords rule, but anyone who believes Oracle on that point is just plain naive. Point of order - I'm not a big Oracle basher. They have some issues, but the products are mostly pretty good stuff, with some exceptions.

[dfwgator]

What languages does IBM control? Microsoft has .NET, now Oracle has Java.

[Psycho_Bunny]

er....Apple?

[mj1234]

I think IBM screwed up bigtime-

Like Oracle, they are big developers with JAVA -
who has infrastructure for Cloud computing?-meaning
SOFTWARE,storage,APPservers, etc- IBM would have solidified their position - They now will have to compete
against Oracle on a whole lot of other fronts.

IBM had DB2 - but even they said their software ran
great (and at times made a compelling difference)on
Sun Multi-Threaded Multi core chips-

In the early 2000-2004 time frame when Sun was selling
The Enterprise Sparc servers(4800,6800,E20K etc.)- guess
who the largest customer was?-— IBM global services

It will be interesting if this works out for Sun and Oracle

[the_daug]

is to kill off Sun's competing software products

Should make a law that companies who orphan a software product be forced to release it into the Public Domain.

[VeniVidiVici]

Assuming Oracle wants to make a profit on hardware is incorrect. They’ve been selling their software sans hardware since their inception. They certainly don’t need it now.

Sun will give Oracle the means for cradle-to-grave service. Bundle apps, development and hardware into a bundle for ease of integration. Charge enough for the hardware to cover cost and earn income/profit with software and support.

Brilliant.

[hoosierham]

I vote for that.

Buying and shutting down a competitor has long been a bad feature of business practice.