Oracle Buys More Middleware; Sun Buys a Database

Two giant enterprise vendors announced they are absorbing major players in the SOA middleware and database worlds. Does this mean more consolidation is on the way? Not necessarily.

On Wednesday, BEA finally accepted a generous bid from Oracle Corporation, at $8.5 billion, far more generous than the measly $6.7 billion offered last fall. In a much smaller deal (only $1 billion), Sun Microsystems announced it is acquiring the largest open source database company on the market, MySQL.

Oracle appears to be evolving into a large assemblage of application and middleware offerings underpinned by a database; while Sun appears to be evolving into a large assemblage of open-source communities underpinned by hardware.

From the Oracle-BEA perspective, it’s now likely that BEA will likely sooner or later be absorbed into Oracle “Fusion” of enterprise software companies. BEA is a big player in the SOA and app server space, so this is not a trivial acqusition for Oracle, which also seeks to dominate this sector. In fact, for Oracle, the ability to dominate SOA middleware is essential to the long-term future of the company. Both Oracle’s bread-and-butter products — its database and ERP suite — could be usurped by functionality moved up into the middleware layer. Companies are alreday finding ways to do end-runs around upgrading these expensive solutions with their own standardized services and interfaces.

Sun appears to be increasingly betting its business on the open source world, with a revenue emphasis on service and servers versus actual software sales. Sun’s two software jewels — its Solaris operating system and Java programming language — have been open sourced. Sun also supports open-source middleware in the form of the Glassfish application server. Add to that the OpenOffice.org offering for desktop productivity systems.

Call it the “JASMO” stack — Java/Apache/Solaris/MySQL/OpenOffice.

From a MySQL customer perspective, the deal puts a large and deep-pocketed support structure behind the open source database. Surveys and interviews we have done here for Unisphere Research and Database Trends & Applications have consistently found a lingering perception open source databases don’t have the support structure that an Oracle or DB2 have behind them — a key crtieria for entreprise customers.