Whatever you think those two acquisitions are all about, for me, those are all good news.
BEA has agreed to acquisition by Oracle Corp, for $8.5 billion dollars, as mentioned as a possibility by TSS back in October 2007. This strengthens Oracle’s SOA market share, giving it access to BEA’s AquaLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit, Kodo, and BEA Workshop.
It’s a logical move, but one that gives Oracle a lot of redundancy: Oracle already has an application server, already has a SOA stack, already has a transaction management through BPM and its flagship database, already has social computing initiatives, and already offers a development environment via JDeveloper. BEA, of course, gains Oracle’s marketing strength and more integration with products like Tangosol Coherence, acquired by Oracle in March 2007.
What do TSS readers see as happening? BEA clearly has some strong products, so that’s an obvious “win” for Oracle: JRockit, Kodo, and WebLogic Workshop are excellent offerings.
That said, does Oracle really need another JPA implementation? It now has TopLink and Kodo, so it has JPA support through both products; it also gets JDO courtesy of Kodo.
What about application servers? Oracle licensed the OrionServer source years ago, and has since created a completely separate product in OC4J; is Oracle going to relegate OC4J to the back burner, or BEA WebLogic? Or will both application servers remain as “flagship offerings,” competing with each other much as WebSphere Community Edition does with WebSphere? (One obvious difference is that WebSphere CE is based on the open source application server from Apache, Geronimo.)
WebLogic Workshop is a suite of extensions to Eclipse; Oracle already has JDeveloper, a standalone Java IDE. Does this mean Oracle is planning on using Eclipse as a base platform, or is it planning on reducing the emphasis on Workshop? (Of course, this is somewhat dependent on what happens to BEA WebLogic Server, as Workshop has a lot of useful integration tools with WLS.)
In any case, congratulations go out to both companies. We look forward to seeing what happens in the future.
Sun Microsystems has agreed to buy MySQL AB for $1B, giving them additional leverage in the open source community and providing access to MySQL to its larger corporations. The deal is expected to close during the third or fourth quarter.
The grand question, of course, is: what does this mean in the long term? Sun already offers JavaDB as a smaller-scale DB (compared to ‘large offerings’ like Oracle9 and IMS). Is Sun merely diversifying its own portfolio, looking for an additional revenue stream from MySQL AB’s customers, or shifting away from JavaDB/Derby? Consider the following quote from Sun’s press release:
MySQL’s open source database is the “M” in LAMP – the software platform comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl often viewed as the foundation of the Internet. Sun is committed to enhancing and optimizing the LAMP stack on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows along with OpenSolaris and MAC OS X. The database from MySQL, OpenSolaris and GlassFish, together with Sun’s Java platform and NetBeans communities, will create a powerful Web application platform across a wide range of customers shifting their applications to the Web.
More than 100 million copies of MySQL’s high-performance open source database software have been downloaded and distributed and an additional 50,000 copies are downloaded daily. This broad penetration coupled with MySQL’s strength in Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), enterprise, telecom and the OEM embedded market make it an important fit for Sun. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems.
Does this sound like a good sign for Sun’s commitment to JavaDB/Derby?