Musings on Oracle Acquisition of Sun

Beyond the public positioning about the importance of Java, there is an interesting open source angle to the purchase of Sun by Oracle, particularly from the database perspective. Several years back, through a market study of IOUG members, Unisphere was able to document and quantify the adoption and experimentation with MySQL among Oracle customers – over one-third had installed MySQL, the open source database, somewhere in their organization. Within three months of the release of that study in mid-2006, Oracle announced the bundling of Red Hat with database shipments, as well as a service offer. At the time, that looked like a smart tactical move by offering a less pricy alternative to Oracle-on-Solaris.  During the same general timeframe, both Oracle and Microsoft released their free “Express” editions of their databases – a move that substantially darkened MySQL’s prospects for broader enterprise acceptance.

In mid-2007, we revisited the same topic via IOUG through the study “Open Source in the Enterprise”. This time the study was actually sponsored by MySQL. From where we sit, the most compelling statistic to come out of that study was the virtual standstill in new installations of MySQL over the previous year. The rapidity of the MySQL ramp-up in market penetration through 2006 was reminiscent of the Windows NT eviction of Netware from the enterprise networking OS market. It was a wildfire. Of course, nobody was evicting commercial databases, but the implications were serious. By mid-2007, though, it had come to a virtual standstill. Shortly after the release of the study, MySQL was acquired by Sun, and the news was that Sun would provide the kind of enterprise support and service for open source software the market was demanding – and which was identified in the IOUG “Open Source in the Enterprise” study sponsored by MySQL, oddly enough. But from here, the purchase of MySQL by Sun (reportedly at $1 billion) looked to be about a year-and-a-half late.

Now Oracle is acquiring Sun. From my perspective, the open source angle is compelling and largely under the radar, other than to MySQL users. This acquisition only increases our already-healthy respect for Oracle’s management of the open source phenomenon. Personally, I cannot recall a defter, more subtle or more committed blunting of a potentially disruptive technology over the past ten years by an enterprise software vendor. Is MySQL soon to become nothing more than an Oracle “loss-leader”? Or does Oracle have something more interesting in mind?

Perhaps someone more academically-inclined will author the chapter on this series of maneuvers by Oracle in dealing with the challenge of open source software, because it’s a masterful, anticipatory and creative strategy that deserves to be recognized – and with the evolution of open source applications, its an approach that may be directional for each of the “MISO” vendors in the not-too-distant future.